Epiphenom

Religious people want religious leaders - of any religion

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:51:00 +0000

A lot of people think that the Muslim world is just fundamentally different from the Christian world. That's the basis for the idea that we're facing a clash of civilisations (a theory put forward by the American political scientist Samuel Huntingdon back in 1993).

One aspect of the theory says that religion is more tightly integrated into the political structure in Muslim countries. The idea is that the power structures of Christian religious institutions are separated from the secular power structures, which makes it easier to separate Church and State.

A team of social scientists lead by Nate Breznau at the University of Breman set out to test this idea by seeing whether Muslims really are more likely to want religious leaders, and to do this they used data from the World Values Survey.

When you look at the raw data, it turns out that yes, if you average out across the word then Muslims are quite a lot more likely to want religious leaders. However, it turns out that that's partly to do with the relative poverty of many Muslim countries, and also that Muslims tend simply to be more devout. Other important factors include the high level of corruption in many Muslim countries.

The graph to the right shows the relative importance of all the different factors they unearthed.

You can see clearly that religious devotion is one of the most important factors driving support for religious leaders, and that this doesn't really differ between Christians and Muslims.

So far so good. Religious people prefer religious leaders - which is, after all only what you might expect. What you might not expect, however, is that religious people prefer religious leaders of any religion!

So, for example, devout Christians living in Muslim majority countries still want religious leaders - even though those leaders would almost certainly be Muslims, rather than Christians.

What's more, Christians in Muslim countries are as likely to want religious leaders as Muslims in Muslim countries. Which just goes to show that it's the characteristics of the country, and not the religion, that's the driving factor.

It seems that this aspect, at least, of the 'Clash of Civilizations' theory is a fantasy. The clash here is not between two different religions, but rather between the religious and the non-religious.

Breznau, N., Lykes, V., Kelley, J., & Evans, M. (2011). A Clash of Civilizations? Preferences for Religious Political Leaders in 86 Nations Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50 (4), 671-691 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2011.01605.x

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

People say they're good if they think God is watching

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:47:00 +0000

If you subliminally remind people about God, it can change their behaviour in all sorts of interesting ways. It can make people more honest, more obedient, more punishing, and even more persevering against impossible odds. And although it's not certain, it seems to work for atheists as well as the religious.

Nobody really knows quite how this effect works, but one possibility is that reminding people about God creates in them the sensation that they are being watched. If people feel like they're being watched, their behaviour changes markedly (even simply stick a photo of a pair of eyes in their peripheral vision, and they cheat less and condemn more).

Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, wanted to test this theory. One way they did this was to prime undergrads with thoughts of god - explicitly, not subliminally. They primed others with thoughts of other people, or nothing in particular.

Then they asked them questions about how self-conscious they felt ("Right now I am self-conscious about the way I look," "Right now I am concerned about what other people think of me," “Right now, I am concerned about the way I present myself.")

As you can see in the graph, the results they got were different for believers and non-believers.

Believers had low self-consciousness in the control condition, and their self-awareness was increased by both the People and the God priming.

Non-believers had higher self-consciousness in the control condition, which was unaffected by the people prime and actually went down with the God prime!

They also ran another experiment, which looked at something called 'socially desirable responding'. That's the tendency we all have to say the 'right thing'.

For example, if you ask people if they are "sometimes irritated by people who ask favours of me" they will usually say no - whereas, in reality of course, any normal person is sometimes irritated in that situation. We know we shouldn't be, but we are.

What Gervais found in his undergraduate subjects was that believers tend not to give socially desirable responses, unless they get primed first with thoughts of God. Non-believers, on the other hand, were more likely to give the socially desirable response without priming, and priming didn't have any affect on them.

What these studies show is that god primes really do seem to trigger responses that you would expect if people felt they were being watched. That's certainly the case for believers, although perhaps not so for non-believers.

Gervais, W., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (1), 298-302 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.09.006

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

Religion and health - a double edged sword

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:29:00 +0000

Long-time readers of this blog may remember a post from 2009 on religion and health. It summarized the findings of nearly 60 studies, and concluded that while going to church seemed to be linked to better health, religious beliefs per se were unimportant.

Studies that have been published since seem to support this notion, but what nobody's been quite sure of is why church going should be linked to better health at all. Two recent studies have shed some light on the issue.

The first used data from a survey of 35,000 Norwegians, and found that regular churchgoers had lower blood pressure - after taking into account other factors that can affect blood pressure, such as age. Blood pressure is a good general indicator of your overall cardiovascular health, and so picks out those people most at risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

Now, there have been a lot of previous studies that have found similar things, but this is the first large study in a mostly non-religious country. Given that only 4% of Norwegians attend church regularly, it's fascinating that the link between church and blood pressure still holds.

The second study is even more interesting.

Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University, and Ben Moulton (a data analyst), wanted to find out how religion, health, and education interact. They used data from 22,000 Americans who participated in the National Health Interview Survey in 1987, and whose deaths were recorded over the next 20 years.

What they found (after crunching the numbers through a model to account for a host of other factors) is best understood by taking a quick squint at the graphic below. Higher bars indicate greater likelihood of dying.

You can see that, for the less well educated, the risk of dying goes down as church attendance goes up. As you would expect.

Surprisingly, however, for the educated the effect is exactly opposite! Educated people who go to church often are actually more likely to die young!

Sherkat puts this down to the double-edged effects of religious teaching on healthy behaviour.

On the one hand, it encourages abstinence from harmful drugs like tobacco and alcohol. That's great for the ill-educated who may not know any better (or be motivated to abstain). But not so much use for the educated, who have had the risks drummed into them and who are unlikely to overdo the booze and fags in the first place.

On the other hand, it tends to undermine science and evidence-based medicine. That might be particularly a problem for the educated, who might otherwise be expect to know better.

Overall, because there are more ill-educated people than educated ones, religious attendance has a beneficial effect. But the benefit really accrues to the ill-educated. For the educated, religion (at least, the kind of religion widely practised in the USA) might actually be harmful.

Sørensen, T., Danbolt, L., Lien, L., Koenig, H., & Holmen, J. (2011). The Relationship between Religious Attendance and Blood Pressure: The Hunt Study, Norway The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 42 (1), 13-28 DOI: 10.2190/PM.42.1.b

Moulton, B., & Sherkat, D. (2012). Specifying the Effects of Religious Participation and Educational Attainment on Mortality Risk for U.S. Adults Sociological Spectrum, 32 (1), 1-19 DOI: 10.1080/02732173.2012.628552

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

How your genes can affect your response to religion

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:56:00 +0000

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that carries a signal across nerve junctions. You might know of it because of its links to Parkinson's disease, but it's actually pretty widespread in the brain and does a number of interesting things.

Variants of one particular molecular receptor for dopamine, the D4 receptor, seem to have interesting links with risk taking and novelty seeking. But the links are not at all straightforward, and recent research suggests that what it actually does is tweak your susceptibility to environmental influences.

Joni Sasaki, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wanted to know if this could help explain the mixed responses to religious priming that have been reported before. As regular readers of this blog will know, giving people subliminal religious prompts seems to make them more prosocial, but the effect doesn't seem clear cut.

So what Sasaki and colleagues did was to run a straightforward religious priming experiment. The subjects (all undergraduates) had to unscramble words to form sentences. Half the subjects were given sentences that had a religious theme, the other other had non-religious sentences. The idea is to get people thinking about religion without realising what they are doing.

Afterwards, they measured their subjects willingness to volunteer for a bunch of actual organizations and clubs around the college.

The top line results were similar to other studies. Overall, religious people were no more willing to volunteer than the non-religious, but people who had been primed with religion were more willing to volunteer - regardless of whether or not they were religious themselves.

But not everybody responded to the priming. As the graphic shows, the response depended on the variant of the D4 gene. People with one particular variation (2-/7-repeat allele) got a really big prosocial boost from the religious prime. People with the other variant were pretty prosocial without the prime, and their prosociality actually decreased with priming!

All this goes to show that the relationship between genetics and religion is not at all straightforward (something I've touched on before. This particular gene variant seems to make people more susceptible to environmental influences - whether religious or otherwise.

If you looked at these people in a religious environment, then you would say that this is a gene 'for' religion. Put these same people in a non-religious environment, and you would say that is a gene 'against' religion!

Sasaki, J., Kim, H., Mojaverian, T., Kelley, L., Park, I., & Janusonis, S. (2011). Religion priming differentially increases prosocial behavior among variants of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsr089

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

Who thinks Britain should be a Christian country?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:54:00 +0000

In a speech just before Christmas, the British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that "We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so." He did go on to accept that it's OK to have a different religion or even no religion at all, but even so it's an interesting turn of phrase.

He's a politician, of course, so it's clear that he sees some political advantage in making the statement - but just who is he appealing to? After all, religion is pretty unimportant for most British - even the 60-70% who claim to be Christian in some way.

By happy coincidence, recent research by Ingrid Storm at Manchester University has done a neat job in clarifying why some people regard 'Britishness' and Christianity to be linked.

She used data from the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey of over 2,200 people, and grouped the responders according to whether they were non-Christian (a mixed bunch of other religions and also non-believers), nominally Christian (those who said they were Christian but also said they went to Church less often than monthly), and observant Christians (those who go to Church at least monthly).

The survey also asks a bunch of questions related to ideas about national identity. Storm use a statistical technique factor analysis) to group these into three categories:

Civic-symbolic national identity (people whose sense of national identity is linked to cultural symbols, like the national anthem, sport or ceremonies).
Cultural-aesthetic national identity (people whose sense of Britishness is triggered by thoughts of the countryside, or of music, poetry or paintings).
Ethnic national identity (people who believe that immigration is a threat to national identity, or that a non-white person cannot be English, Welsh or Scottish).

The first thing that Storm did was to look at how nationalistic each of the three religious groups were. You'll see from the graph that the non-Christians were the least nationalistic, and the observant Christians were the most nationalistic, at least when it cam to civic and cultural nationalism. Nominal Christians were in between.

The exception was ethnic nationalism. Neither observant Christians nor the non-Christians scored high on this measure, but the nominal Christians did.

In other word, the group most likely to see britishness through an ethnic/racial lens are the people who claim to be Christian, but who don't actually go to church. The cultural Christians, if you will.

Storm then look at the relationship between these three kinds of nationalism and the belief that "Christianity is important for being truly British".

The only kind of nationalism that was linked to this belief was ethnic nationalism. This link held even after controlling for factors like belief in god, authoritarianism, and the belief that Muslims do not want to fit in.

What this suggests is that the people who believe that "Christianity is important for being truly British" are also the people who define Christianity in ethnic, rather the spiritual terms. Storm says:

... thinking religion is important for nationality may be more a function of associating religion with ethnic background than of any nostalgia for the cultural heritage of religious symbols, morals and institutions associated with civic-symbolic or cultural-aesthetic national identity. In other words the more one regards immigration as a threat to national identity and thinks of race and ethnicity as important for belonging to the nation, the more one is likely to see Christianity as important for being British.

In other words, by emphasising the importance of Christianity for British identity, Cameron is appealing to the racists, rather than the religious, in his constituency.

Storm, I. (2011). Ethnic nominalism and civic religiosity: Christianity and national identity in Britain The Sociological Review, 59 (4), 828-846 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02040.x

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

That was the year that was 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:55:00 +0000

So, farewell 2011, and hello 2012! Happy Gregorian New Year, and welcome to the wrap up of all the great science covered in Epiphenom over the past year.

Let's start with what we've learned about why people believe. Are we born religious, or do we learn it? This year there was more evidence that kids are not really innate believers in the supernatural, but on the other hand we saw some evidence that even atheists have a kind of intuition that dead people can still think. Intriguingly, the magic in religious stories seems to be tailor made to be weird, but not so weird as to be outrageous.

There was more evidence that the link between education and the strength of religious beliefs is really quite complicated, although atheists are more likely to be grammar Nazis! Perhaps more important than education is the type of thinking - it seems that deep thinkers are more likely to lose their faith.

There were some interesting studies on the link between psychiatric disorders and religion. People with religious or paranormal beliefs are also more likely to be psychotic, perhaps because they form part of a reinforcing world-view, prompted by a failure of rational thought. On the other hand, autistics are more likely than average to be atheists, perhaps because they don't have the same social drives. Dope smokers are more religious than booze drinkers, although I'm not sure what that tells us!

Your environment clearly influences how religious you become. The need to belong can increase the desire to be part of a religion - but if you fulfil that need in other ways, religious feelings decrease. Pakistani students who have been exposed to terrorism are likely to be more religious. In Europe, both financial and physical insecurity can lead to more religion. Although fear of death can make people more religious, it seems that this is really down to the associated uncertainty, rather than the idea of dying itself. In Taiwan, the risk averse are also more likely to be religious.

However, although fear and uncertainty predisposes to religion, people who have had bad stuff actually happen to them seem to be less religious. People who have sustained nasty head injuries are less likely to believe in a caring god. Similarly, the friends and families of the 9-11 dead are also less likely to be religious.

What about the effects of religion? One thing it seems to do is induce a certain amount of fatalism. For example, religious people are better able to resist temptation, but they are also less willing to work to achieve their goals. What's more, people who have faith in god are less likely to take their prescribed medicine, are less likely to get vaccinated, and more likely to have unprotected sex. Perhaps this is why neighbourhoods in the USA with a lot of Pentecostals also have the highest infant mortality.

On the plus side, religion does seem to reduce stress. Religious people who are in it (at least partly) for the external show are less likely to get stressed out by unfortunate events. Religious people who trust in God are also less stressed.

Reduced stress could be linked to better social integration, and it brings real health benefits. The brains of people who follow a mainstream religion (mainline Protestantism in the USA) degrade slower than those of others, perhaps because they experience less social stress. In America, the reason the non-religious have a shorter life expectancy is probably because they are less socially integrated.

This social integration is more properly called social capital, and research from the US has found religion and social capital to be closely intertwined. But research this year from the less religious Europe showed that the two are not necessarily linked, because in Europe social capital is increasing, despite the decreasing importance of religion.

There was a lot of new research this year into the pro- and anti-social effects of religion. Religious people, at least, don't think much of atheists. Christians are more disgusted by The God Delusion than by the Koran, and think atheists are as untrustworthy as rapists. Readers of this blog will know, however, that you don't need god to be good. Stuart West, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University in the UK, explained the many interesting ways in which seemingly 'pure' altruism can evolve. Indeed, religious people's distrust of atheists can be reduced if you convince them that atheists are actually quite common.

Subliminal religious primes do seem to have some interesting effects on behaviour. They stop fundamentalists from telling white lies, and even atheists given subliminal religious prompts became more altruistic. The sensation of being watched makes people more censorious. Indeed, Christianity may have invented the idea of thought crime. The good news is that self-inflicted pain seems to reduce feelings of guilt.

Whether this has any meaningful effect outside the lab is hard to say. Religion seems to have no effect on dodgy company accounting, which is perhaps because belief in god can both discourage and also encourage cheating, depending on the kind of god you believe in. The precise brand of religion also matters. For example, Protestants in Germany are more trusting than Catholics.

However, there was more evidence this year that it seems to be religious service attendance, rather than beliefs, that are a crucial factor in charitable giving. And speaking of churchgoing and trust, Americans say they go to church about twice as often as they actually do - a gap between claim and reality that's much bigger than for other countries.

This year saw more evidence that income inequality increases the support for religion. But this year there was also quite a lot of evidence on the reverse effect - the link between religion and a right-wing political stance.

For example, Christians in Europe are opposed to government welfare programmes. In the USA, religious people are more likely to support torture, due to the link between religion and right-wing politics. In Europe, the link between nationalism and religion is strongest in those nations that have a dominant national religion. However, other research showed that religious fundamentalism is a different beast to right-wing authoritarianism, based on which groups are the subject of hatred (although many people have both delightful traits). Religious nations are more sexist, and of course evangelists love Walmart - probably because the company sets out to align itself with their values.

Nations that believe in tighter social control are more religious, and revolutionaries in Muslim countries actually want countries that place greater restrictions on personal freedoms - an ominous portent for the future of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. Research out this year suggested that the rich use religion to keep the poor in their place - certainly, legal protections of property are weaker in more religious nations.

In fact, although religious divisions don't seem to be a particular cause of civil conflict, it does seem that governments use these divisions as a way of clamping down. In the Gaza strip, religious aggression in young boys is linked to higher testosterone levels, and so seems to be fundamentally different to antisocial aggression. Perhaps that's why societies marked by religious divisions don't seem to have higher murder rates, although they do seem to be unhappier.

The alleged connection between religion and happiness came under a lot of scrutiny this year. Religion doesn't make the English happier, and in fact the world over highly religious people are only happier than the non-religious when they live in very religious countries. However the countries with the most religious people are not happier on average, perhaps because non-religious nations have a higher quality of life. In fact, moderate believers could benefit from less, not more religion. Perhaps all this helps to explain why some countries have high levels of non-belief - it's simply that these non-believers are among the most contented.

And lastly, what is the future for religion? Well, a mathematical model predicted that religion is on the road to extinction - at least if a few key assumptions hold! On the other hand, projections of birth rates and immigration suggest that the secularisation of Europe will stop in the next few decades, and Europe will start to become more religious.

So that's it for 2011. If you want to check out previous wrap-ups, well here's 2010 and here is 2009. Roll on 2012!

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

Inteview with La revolución naturalista

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:04:00 +0000

The Spanish language blog La revolución naturalista has just posted a short written interview with me (in English, although there is a Spanish version). It covers some stuff on the cognitive science of religion, and on why some countries are more religious than others.

You can check it out here.

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

Goodwill to all men?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 22:03:00 +0000

This being the season of good will to all men (at least for those of us with a Christian heritage), it's time to bring a little harmony to the most tumultuous conflict of our times. Yes, I'm talking about the war between 'new' atheists and the religious.

When you see these folks slogging it out on the internet, one regular touch point is over whether religion causes wars - or at least makes them worse.

Of course, we can all cite wars in which the two sides have different religions, but often the two sides differ in lots of other ways. Quite often, what we see is two different ethnic groups fighting. So is religion really contributing to these conflicts, or is it an innocent bystander?

Who is right in the great atheist versus religious battle? Well, the best way to bring some Christmas peace is, of course, to get science to shed some light on the matter. If in doubt, quantify!

Kürşad Turan, at the University of Ankara, has done just this using a database created by the Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland. Turan wanted to know whether language barriers or religious barriers were the biggest contributors to ethnic strife. Uniquely, he was able to look at the problem from the perspective of both the ethnic groups and of the State.

First he looked at the factors that contributed to protest and rebellion by ethnic minorities. Here he found that use of different languages by ethnic groups was much more likely to be associated with inter-ethnic strife than religious differences.

In fact, religious differences had a negative effect! If two ethnic groups had different religions, conflict was actually slightly less likely.

When it came to state repression, however, it was a different story. State repression is actually higher in countries where ethnic groups are separated by religion. Language had no effect on state repression. What's more, state repression of religion increases ethnic conflict, while state repression of language decreases it.

Turan concludes that religion and language play a different roles for ethnic agitators and state repressors. He thinks that states can try to subtly control language, but are more likely to try to co-opt religion. When they repress language, people conform. When they repress religion, people revolt.

Of course, that's not to say that religion isn't a flash point between people. There's an interesting working paper produced by an EU-funded research programme into conflict (actually based at the University of Sussex, just down the road from me). It's MicroCon Working Paper 18, by Frances Stewart, at Oxford University.

She looked at recent survey conducted in four countries where there is ongoing ethnic strife - Ghana, Nigeria, Indonesia and Malaysia. There were lots of interesting findings, one of which was that religious differences and ethnic differences were about equally often cited as a rationale for violence (as shown in the graphic).

Clearly, then people can be motivated to conflict for either religious or ethnic reasons. But what determines which of the two takes hold in any given location?

Well, based on the interviews that Stewart and her colleagues counducted, she reckons the bottom line is self-interest:

"mobilisation occurred behind the identity which was thought to affect people’s material chances of securing government jobs, contracts etc., rather than behind the identity that appeared to mean most to the people."

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Kürşad Turan (2011). Language and Religion: Different Salience for Different Aspects of Identity International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2 (8), 141-152

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

Religious nonsense is easier to understand than regular nonsense

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

There's a particular brain wave that gets triggered when you hear stuff that doesn't make sense.

It's called the N400, and it's triggered by sentences like "I like my coffee with cream and socks". Although each individual word makes sense, and although the grammar is fine, the semantics is screwy - the meaning of those words is pretty unexpected.

Sabela Fondevila and a team from the University of Madrid wanted to find out if religious stories had the same effect. Religious stories typical have some pretty far out indicidents, of course - walking on water, that sort of thing. Are these stories nonsensical, though, or is there some kind of method to their madness?

So they got their subjects to read some carefully phrased sentences describing religious miracles, some matched sentences that had the same grammatical stucture but with random nonsensical claims, and also some completely sensible ones.

To make sure that the religious statements were unexpected and unfamiliar, they took their miracles from non-biblical texts - Hindu, Mesoamerican, Japanese, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, African, Australian, Chinese, Polynesian, and Inuit.

So, for each nonsensical religious sentence, like "Under the Earth lives the wind", there was an equivalent pure nonsense sentence: "Under the Earth lives the dining-room", and a sensible statement "Under the Earth lives the mole". Another example is "With a hook, from the bottom of the sea, he took out the islands" paired with "With a hook, from the bottom of the sea, he took out the problems". The sensible statement had him hooking up a fish.

What they found was that the size of the N400 wave was largest for the pure nonsense, and smallest for the sensible sentences. The religious statements were in-between.

This suggests is that the religious statements, although nonsensical and clearly impossible, were not such hard work to understand. For whatever reason, they seemed more sensible than the pure nonsense statements.

Just to make sure of it, they also asked a different group of people straight out: “How easy is it for you to imagine a context (books, films, newspapers, etc.) in which these statements may appear?” Sure enough, the religious statements were thought to be considerably more plausible.

Fondevila thinks that this is further support for the idea that religions are minimally counterintuitive. Previous research has suggested that gods, like comic book characters, tend to be mostly normal with a few special powers.

The theory goes that the most memorable stories are those that are grounded in reality, but have a few counterintuitive twists that make them stand out. And there's some evidence to support this.

So the ideal god is magical enough to make him interesting and worthy of our special attention as something that could just about be real. But not so magical as to be utter nonsense!

Fondevila, S., Martín-Loeches, M., Jiménez-Ortega, L., Casado, P., Sel, A., Fernández-Hernández, A., & Sommer, W. (2011). The sacred and the absurd—an electrophysiological study of counterintuitive ideas (at sentence level) Social Neuroscience, 1-13 DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2011.641228

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

Dope smokers are more spiritual than boozers

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:51:00 +0000

Source

What's your poison? Based on some new data from a Czech study, your preferences could speak a lot about your spiritual beliefs.

For the study Radmilla Lorencova, at the University of Pardubice in the Czech Republic, interviewed 155 men and women from universities, some kind of club in Prague, and residents of a housing estate.

This being the Czech republic, half of them (74) were atheists, while 24 were conventionally religious and the remaining 57 are described as being "sympathizers with Eastern religions, religious groups or sects, or having their own religion". Eighty-one of them used both marijuana and alcohol (usually not together), while 58 stuck just to alcohol.

The dope smokers scored higher on mystical aspects of spirituality than did alcohol drinkers. What's more, when respondents associated mystical feelings with a drug, it was never with alcohol - instead they mentioned LSD and marijuana.

The most common experience that was linked to drug use was that "I have had the feeling that the secrets of the universe and of existence are opening before me". Potent stuff.

However, this link between drug use and spirituality was not seen among atheists. Atheists, as you would expect, scored rather low on measures of mystical aspects of spirituality (although they score just as high as everyone else on aspects of moral involvement and conscientiousness).

Now, the other interesting finding was that drug use was equally spread across all groups. While 60% of 'sympathizers' and 57% of atheists smoked dope, so did 50% of the religious - a small difference that wasn't statistically significant.

So it seems that there are religious (and religiously minded) Czechs out there getting powerful spiritual experiences from smoking dope, but that alcohol is free of spiritualistic baggage.

Which makes me wonder about a seemingly unrelated fact. Have you ever wondered why marijuana is illegal, while alcohol is not? You could argue that alcohol is part of the traditional culture for Europeans, but then what about tobacco?

Perhaps there is a religious subtext. Perhaps marijuana is frowned upon because of the danger of leading people away from official religions, by giving them mystical experiences not tied to the official dogma.

By the way, this is the second post about alcohol drinking in the Czech republic. In case you missed the first one (from 2008), here it is: Beer and science don't mix!

Lorencova R (2011). Religiosity and spirituality of alcohol and marijuana users. Journal of psychoactive drugs, 43 (3), 180-7 PMID: 22111401

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

Moderate believers might benefit from less, not more religion

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 20:32:00 +0000

I always enjoy analyses of religion done by people whose main research focus lies in other fields. They tend to have quite a refreshing take.

So here's a study written by three outsiders. You probably already know Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational (and if you don't, well then get out and read the book this moment!). The lead is Daniel Mochon, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Freeman School of Business at Tulane University, and the other is Michael Norton, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School.

So, three specialists in marketing, who have set out to discover who, exactly benefits from religion. To do this, they used an online survey company to gather responses from over 6,000 people across the UK. Their basic aim was to relate two different measures of religion: affiliation (i.e. whether they said that they were a Christian, or a Methodist, or a Wiccan etc) and religiosity (i.e. how religious they are, on a scale from 1-7).

They measured well-being by asking a bunch of questions related to life satisfaction, hopelessness, depression, self esteem, how they felt right now and in general, and how satisfied they were with their spiritual and religious life.

The graphic shows the headline results. The well-being of religious adherents follows a clear U-shape, with the least happy being those people with moderate faith.

The straight lines show the well-being of people who didn't declare a religious faith - those who said they were atheists were the happiest, agnostics were less happy, and those who were just 'none' were the least happy of all.

In addition to this plot, they also ran a bunch of simple models to explore all the different factors and to put the results on firmer statistical grounds. But these models basically confirmed the picture that's so eloquently depicted in the graph.

So the only religious adherents who are really happy are those who are very religious. Those who are only moderately fervent could benefit by ramping up their faith - but they could also benefit by toning it down still further.

If this sounds familiar, well you're right. There's already evidence that those who are firm non-believers are actually quite happy, thank you very much (see The Happiness Smile). But these new data are the strongest so far.

I'll leave the last words to the study authors:

Were we to place our own children in the distribution of religiosity, the option with the highest expected well-being would entail enrolling them and encouraging them to believe strongly; were we not certain that our children would attain sufficient levels of belief, however, we might prefer them to remain unaffiliated.

Indeed, the non-linear relation between religiosity and well-being suggests that many moderate believers would benefit from reducing their level of religiosity rather than increasing it.

Mochon, D., Norton, M., & Ariely, D. (2010). Who Benefits from Religion? Social Indicators Research, 101 (1), 1-15 DOI: 10.1007/s11205-010-9637-0

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

Nonreligious girls are the most athletic

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:16:00 +0000

When I first read of this study, I was intrigued. According to this news report (which seems to have been picked up by a few other places over the last few days), "children with no religious background tend to be the most skilful athletes".

So I contacted Andreas Krebs, the study lead, and got hold of a copy of the original report (it's available online here - in German). You probably won't be surprised to hear that the results don't exactly support the news headlines, but they're all the more interesting for that.

The study basically records the athleticism of first-grade school kids (7-8 years old) in the small Swiss city of Winterthur. The battery of tests included things like running, jumping, stretching and tapping (yeah, beats me too).

They broke down the results in a few different ways - religion is just an incidental part of the report, near the end.

The figure shows the results: boys at the top, girls at the bottom. The separate bars show the results for 4 sequential years.

The non-religious kids are in the middle. To the left are the Muslim kids, to the right are Protestants and then Catholics. The size of the bars shows the z-score - basically how far above or below average that sub-group is, relative to the group as a whole.

So, non-religious boys actually have average athletic ability, while non-religious girls are above average.

Why should that be? Well, I think the clue is in the particularly low scores for the Muslim girls (and other minor religions). These girls are often restricted by their culture from fully participating in sport.

Does the same apply to Christians, but to a lesser extent? If so, then that would explain the results.

It could simply be that religious parents - both Christian and Muslim, have sexist attitudes towards kids and sport. Muslims tend to discourage kids from sport, but especially girls. Christians tend to encourage kids, but especially boys.

Non-religious parents, on the other hand, seem to be not particularly sports-minded, but are completely non-sexist when it comes to encouraging their kids. As a result, their boys have only average ability, but their girls are way above average.

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

Why do the religious give to charity: learning from Taiwan

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 20:30:00 +0000

It seems likely that religious people in the West give more to charity - in the narrow sense of financial donations, at least (see Atheists are generous - they just don't give to charity for more details).

But what is it about religion that has this effect? Is it that the fear of being watched makes people behave nicer. Perhaps it's that religious teachings simply encourage charity. Or maybe it's being in a religious congregation and having someone demand that you hand over cash.

One way to dig into this is to take a look at other cultures. Taiwan is a good case study, because it has a good mix of folk religion, atheists, and world religions (Buddhism and Christianity).

Hiewu Su and colleagues, from the National Dong-Hwa University in Taiwan interviewed 410 Taiwanese about their charitable and religious habits, among other things.

Christians gave the most, followed by Buddhists, then Folk religionists and finally those with no religion.

These were not large differences, and indeed they also found that giving is a "rational and planned behavior for both religious and nonreligious people". In other words, regardless of religion, what people give can be predicted on the basis of their income, age, and whether they felt that charities were open about how they spent their money.

There was one other, crucial, factor that affected charitable giving (the most important, in fact), and that was religious service attendance.They found that religious service attendance was the most important factor determining whether and how much people gave to charity - even for people with no religion.

However, there were big differences here between the religions. Buddhists who went to religious services were 2.4 times as likely to give to charity, and Christians were 2.2 times as likely. However, folk religionists and atheists who went to services were only 1.7 times as likely to give as those who did not attend.

When it came to the amount of giving, they found that this was significantly increased for Christians and Buddhists who went to religious services, but not for folk religionists and atheists.

What I take from this is that we can discount simplistic ideas that a watchful 'eye in the sky' encourages us to give more. After all, it doesn't seem to encourage folk religionists to give.

On the other hand, religious gatherings do seem to encourage charitable giving. That might be because people are actually encouraged to give on the spot, or it might be that giving to co-religionists is easier than random giving, or it might be something to do with religious teachings.

And with that last idea in mind, I find it fascinating that the effect of religious gatherings is largest for Christians and Buddhists. These are two very different religions - about the only thing they have in common is that they are both "World Religions".

What that means is that they are religions that ahve been adopted by people from a wide variety of different cultural backgrounds. As a result, they have special features that make them especially attractive to people who live in large, organised mega-societies. The kinds of societies in which dealing with strangers is commonplace.

Previous research has found that world religions are linked to the emergence of ideas of fairness to and sharing with strangers. This research adds to that, suggesting that it's only in the religious congregations of these world religions that charity gets a boost - it's not an intrinsic consequence of religion in general terms.

Su, H., Chou, T., & Osborne, P. (2011). When Financial Information Meets Religion: Charitable-giving Behavior in Taiwan Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, 39 (8), 1009-1019 DOI: 10.2224/sbp.2011.39.8.1009

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

Atheists and rapists: you just can't trust 'em

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:25:00 +0000

Atheists are a pretty disliked bunch of people in North America. Most atheists will be aware of polling data that puts them at the bottom of the loathing pile.

Question is, what's driving that loathing? Will Gervais (University of British Columbia, Canada), who's previously published some fascinating research into this topic, is back with some more research (co-authored by another couple of names familiar to this blog: Azim Shariff and Ara Norenzayan).

Gervais' basic hypothesis is that prejudice against people who are not part of your group can be driven by different fears. For example, White Americans fear Black Americans, but view homosexual Americans with disgust. Gervais puts that together with another idea that many people have - that fear of supernatural punishment makes people more honest - to hypothesise that people dislike atheists specifically because they distrust them.

To test this, they took advantage of a clever psychological trick. Here is its original form (invented by Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman), as described recently in The Guardian:

Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that's logically impossible. (It can't be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the "conjunctive fallacy", whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.

In Gervais' twist on this classic, students at the University of British Columbia were told about Richard. Here's Richard's story:

Richard is 31 years old. On his way to work one day, he accidentally backed his car into a parked van. Because pedestrians were watching, he got out of his car. He pretended to write down his insurance information. He then tucked the blank note into the van’s window before getting back into his car and driving away.

Later the same day, Richard found a wallet on the sidewalk. Nobody was looking, so he took all of the money out of the wallet. He then threw the wallet in a trash can.

So, is Richard most likely to be a teacher, or a teacher and a Christian? What about a teacher and Muslim. Or a rapist? Or an atheist?

Well, the chilling results are shown in the graphic. Atheism was up there with rapist as an intuitive fit to Richard's character. Atheists? Don't trust 'em!

Gervais and co ran another study, in which half the students were given a different version of Richard. This Richard is not untrustworthy, but he is disgusting (with horrible, flaky skin and snot all over him).

They found that that the disgusting Richard was not associated with atheism (or, indeed, with homosexuality - even though they found in a different study that homosexuals evoke disgust).

What this and some other studies they did showed is that the reason atheists are disliked is specifically because they are distrusted.

They also found that the degree of this distrust is governed by the strength of belief that supernatural monitoring helps to enforce good behaviour. Those who believe this are most likely to distrust atheists.

So although lack of familiarity with atheists increases distrust, it seems that the root of this distrust is not simple fear of the unknown, or even fear about moral corruption, but rather a genuine and seemingly deep-rooted fear that people will not behave well unless they have an invisible policeman watching over them.

Which probably says rather more about these Christians than it does about atheists!

Gervais, W., Shariff, A., & Norenzayan, A. (2011). Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101 (6), 1189-1206 DOI: 10.1037/a0025882

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

Religious diversity linked to unhappiness

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:27:00 +0000

Most people - certainly most atheists - would say that one of the biggest problems with religion is that conflict you get when religion divides people who share a particular part of the world. Of course, there are plenty of examples of conflicts where religion plays a role. However, there is surprisingly little statistical evidence either way.

Part of the problem is in trying to define religious diversity. The method most commonly used in sociological research was developed by Alberto Alesina, an economist at Harvard, and is called 'Fractionalisation'. This computers a number between 0 and 1, which is basically the odds that two people picked at random have the same religion (or race, or whatever else you are looking into).

The problem is that this kind of diversity may not be the diversity that's important here. If everyone had their own personal religion well then, society would indeed be diverse - but it probably wouldn't trigger mass conflict.

An alternative measure is something called 'Polarisation'. The more evenly a country is divided into two major groups, the higher its polarisation will be.

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a sociologist at Harvard, has used both of these measures to see how they interact with life satisfaction (Okulicz-Kozaryn last featured back on this blog in 2009, Happy worshippers, unhappy believers).

He found a small relationship between Fractionalisation and unhappiness, and a somewhat stronger relationship between Polarisation and unhappiness (it's this that is shown in the graphic).

The effect got stronger when he took into account other factors that can affect unhappiness, such as age, marital status, and national wealth.

In fact it got even stronger after accounting for other religious variables, such as whether people attend services (increases happiness), think that religion is important (also increases happiness) or believe in God (which decreases happiness).

Once you account for the positive and negative direct effects of religion on personal happiness, then it becomes clear that religious diversity is linked to increased unhappiness. And that's true whether you measure relisiong as Fractionalisation or as Polarisation.

It's a big effect, too, as Okulicz-Kozaryn says:

...if a country’s fractionalisation index goes up by 0.25, say from the level of 0.57 for Japan to 0.82 for the United States, then life satisfaction for everybody in a country would drop by 0.25 on scale from 1 to 10. This is a big effect – it is similar to shifting 5% of a country’s population from the mildly satisfied category (6) to most dissatisfied category (1). In case of Japan it would be six million people

He's careful to point out that this does not mean that religious diversity is a bad thing. For example, other factors that encourage diversity (openness to other cultures, freedom of speech and expression) could increase happiness.

But it does support the belief that many people have: that religion can often serve to reinforce and even create barriers and mutual suspicion.

Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2011). Does religious diversity make us unhappy? Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2010.550277

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

Does Christianity make mere thoughts into crime?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 20:57:00 +0000

Does religion actually make any difference? By that I mean, does the brand of religion that takes hold in a particular region (Islam, Buddhism, Animism etc) actually change the culture in any meaningful way.

Of course, we know that there are real, measurable differences between adherents of different religions. But is that caused by the religion, or is it simply that cultures differ and that the local religion moulds itself to the local culture?

Adam Cohen, at Arizona State University, thinks that religion can change culture, and he's written an excellent, plain English introduction to his research in the open-access journal "Readings in Psychology and Culture".

A key point that Cohen makes is that Jews and Christians differ on whether simply thinking something wicked is as bad as actually doing something wicked.

So, for example, he found that Christians were more likely than Jews to believe that a man who thinks adulterous thoughts has done something wrong. And not just adultery either - there were similar differences of opinion over a student who fantasises about poisoning his Professor's dog after getting a bad grade.

In another test, he asked Jews and Christians to:

Imagine a son, Mr. K., who does not like his parents very much, because they have very different personalities from him. That son can either pretend to like his parents, or he can ignore and neglect them. If he doesn’t like his parents inside, does it mean anything for him to behave nicely toward them?

As the figure shows, Jews and Christians see Mr. K the same if he both inwardly dislikes his parents and also neglects them in reality (the 'Sincere condition' in the graph). But Jews, in contrast to Christians, were much more likely to think favourably of Mr K if he pretends to like his parents.

Cohen attributes these differences to differences in their respective holy books. For example, Jesus explicitly condemns thought crime ("You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart."). In contrast, Cohen says,

...the Jewish attitude is that it is better to override your temptations out of obedience to God. True virtue is doing what God says even if you don't internally want to.

All of this puts me in mind of George Orwell's novel, 1984, in which he wrote about thoughtcrime:

The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed - would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.

Now, Orwell was an atheist, and his book had a pretty big impact on me when I was a kid. All of which set me to thinking: is thinking bad thoughts a crime for atheists, or are they more like Jews? Even more interesting, are Atheist Jews different from Atheist Christians in this regard?

There is one study out there, which I wrote about last year, which found that Protestants were more likely than Atheists to conflate thinking and doing (Protestants tempt fate, but atheists don't!)

I'd love to hear your perspective, though. Should you feel guilty about thinking nasty things someone and then lying to them? Is that kind of dishonesty bad? If not, why not?

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

In the West, religious nations are more sexist

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:17:00 +0000

This post is number 57 (I'm guessing!) in our series on "religious countries are...", in which I run a correlation between the numbers of religious people in a country and some other national characteristic.

This time it's the turn of sexism. You might expect that religious countries are more sexist, and you'd be right (with one caveats - but I'll deal with that later).

The data come from Mark Brandt, a sociologist at DePaul University in Chicago. I compared this with the number of people who say that religion is either important or very important in their lives (the data for this come from the World Values Survey).

First of all, let's look at the correlation with a straightforward measure of whether women can be leaders, which was assessed by asking the level of agreement with two questions: “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do” and “On the whole, men make better business executives than women do.”

Overall, there's a fairly good correlation. But there is an exception, and that's Asian countries. There are only a few Asian countries in the sample, so it's hard to draw sweeping conclusions. But they are all very sexist, whether their citizens are religious (Thailand, Taiwan) or non-religious (China, Hong Kong, Japan)

So I took these countries out of the analysis - in fact, what's shown in the graphic is only those countries with a predominantly Western, Christian culture (i.e. North and South America, Europe, and Australia).

In these Westernised countries there's a strong, linear relationship between religion and sexism.

In fact, if you narrow the sample a bit more to look only at European countries the fit is even cleaner (I haven't shown this, but it's a remarkably straight line).

You get pretty much the same results when you look at Brandt's other measure (the UN's gender empowerment score). That's important because this is a measure not of attitudes, but of practical effects. Brandt's main point in his paper is that sexist attitudes translate directly into sexist practices.

And the same relationship is seen with religion. The more religious countries also have lower gender empowerment, meaning fewer seats for women in parliament, fewer women in economic decision making positions, and lower female share of income.

Now, the reason for this, it seems to me, is that religion tends to be tied to 'traditional values'. What this analysis suggests is that these traditional values can persist in the absence of religion, but that getting rid of traditional religion seems to be a prerequisite for ditching sexism!

Brandt, M. (2011). Sexism and Gender Inequality Across 57 Societies Psychological Science, 22 (11), 1413-1418 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611420445

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

What kind of insecurity turns Europeans on to religion?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:28:00 +0000

As Europe staggers towards financial apocalypse, one question that's almost certainly not in the minds of Merkel, Sarkozy, and Papandreou is what effect all the turmoil will have on people's religious beliefs. After all, there's been a bunch of research linking anxiety and insecurity to heightened religious beliefs, and earlier this year there was more evidence linking religion to economic insecurity.

But a lot of these studies have been pretty broad brush. They look at average conditions and average levels of religion among a wide basket of countries. Tim Immerzeel and Frank van Tubergen, at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, wanted to dig a little deeper (you might remember van Tubergen from an earlier study looking at income inequality and Church attendance).

They wanted to separate out the effects of an individual's insecurity from the effects of simply living in a country which is, well, less secure. They wanted to separate out the effects of what has happened in the past, from the effects of the current situation. And they also wanted to separate out financial insecurity from existential insecurity (e.g threats to your life).

They did this by looking at the European Social Survey, which interviewed people in 32 European countries and Israel in several rounds from 2002-2009 (actually, they could only use data from 25 countries because several countries [Bulgaria, Cyprus, Croatia, Latvia, Portugal, Romania, and Ukraine] didn't ask all the questions).

They found some interesting things. Firstly, people who are in good health are less religious - although they are more likely to attend Church (perhaps because it's easier for them to get there). Widows and widowers are more religious (people who are divorced are the least religious, however).

People who have experienced war in the past, or the threat of terrorism now, are also more religious.

Financial security also matters, although here it gets a little bit complicated. People in stable employment now are less religious (as are educated people), suggesting that current financial security dampens enthusiasm for religion. However, people whose parents were unemployed when they were kids are actually less religious!

They also found a weak link between the strength of individual religious beliefs and the economic environment. In countries with a high unemployment rate, people were more likely to go to Church but were actually no more religious. Probably they go to Church as a kind of social insurance.

And, unlike what others have found, there was not really very much effect of social welfare spending on religion. No effect on religious beliefs, and only a marginal (negative) effect on Church attendance.

In fact, Immerzeel and van Tubergen found, in general, that the characteristics of the country didn't have all that much effect on an individual's religion - the individual's specific personal circumstances was at least as important.

Now that might sound like a no-brainer, but in fact it differs from what other studies have suggested. In fact, it directly contradicts two studies from earlier this year. The first, from Ed Diener, showed that religion only improves well-being in tough societies. The second, from Frederick Solt and colleagues, found that in unequal countries both rich and poor are more religious.

Maybe that's because Immerzeel and van Tubergen only looked at European countries (and the wealthier ones at that - remember they had to drop some of the poorer ones out). So all the countries were pretty similar, in terms of social insurance and income inequality. Maybe they didn't find a difference simply because there weren't all that many differences to find.

So, not a reason to throw out the idea that general economic malaise can make people less religious, but food for thought.

Their take home is that both economic and existential insecurity can increase religion. More importantly, perhaps, current financial insecurity can indeed lead to stronger religious fervour. Coupled with fertility and immigration trends, this is yet another sign that Europe's secularisation may yet turn a corner.

Immerzeel, T., & van Tubergen, F. (2011). Religion as Reassurance? Testing the Insecurity Theory in 26 European Countries European Sociological Review DOI: 10.1093/esr/jcr072

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

Deliver us from temptation (and take care of everything else, too)

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:05:00 +0000

According to some new research, your ideas about gods can significantly affect your approach to life. Lead researcher Kristin Laurin (at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada) and colleagues Aaron Kay and Grinne M. Fitzsimons (Duke University) ran a series of priming studies, in which the subjects had to form sentences from scrambled sets of words or read a passage about god as part of a bigger study (so they didn't cotton on to the fact that they were being primed). By carefully choosing the words, the researchers could subliminally prime the subjects (all undergraduate students) with different ideas about God.

What they were interested to know was whether reminding people about God can make people less interested in actively pursuing goals (perhaps because they think that God will take care of everything for them) or better able to resist temptation (perhaps because they think God is watching them and will frown upon moral weaknesses!). What they found was that both things can happen, although which effect you see depends upon the type of God that you prime.

So, for example, when they primed the students with a passage describing a controlling God who “understands what it is like to be in our shoes”, they found that the students subsequently expressed less interest in signing up to additional study to attain career goals (such as becoming a lawyer, nurse or stockbroker). However, other students primed with the same god concept declared that they were more able to resist the temptation to hang out and have fun with their friends on an evening when they should be studying for an important exam that was a required step in attaining that career.

In other words, if you pump up people's idea of god as controlling, then they feel more able to resist temptation, but less inclined to work hard to achieve their goals!

As you can see in the graph, other ideas about god had intermediate effects, compared with the control condition in which the student's weren't primed with any god concept at all.

In other studies, they dug into other facets of this relationship. They found that students primed with the idea of god valued achieving just as much, it's just that they were less inclined to put the effort in.

Participants who had read a short passage about God subsequently ate fewer cookies than did those who had read a control passage about a topic unrelated to God. Resistance to temptation was particularly strengthened in students who read passages describing God's omniscience.

The researchers conclude that reminders of God can influence real world goals in both positive and negative ways. What the overall effect will be will depend on what exactly the task in hand is - whether it requires self control or the drive to achieve. It also, they say, depends on what kind of God you have in mind:

If, on the one hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omnipotent, but not omniscient, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be negative. If, on the other hand, a person is reminded of God, and this activates the representation of an omniscient, but not omnipotent, external force (whether as a result of features of the reminder itself or as a result of how the person represents God), the net influence on the person’s self-regulation might be positive.

Laurin, K., Kay, A., & Fitzsimons, G. (2011). Divergent effects of activating thoughts of god on self-regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0025971

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

Europe's religious future

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 21:43:00 +0000

Eric Kaufmann is a demographer and author of the book "Shall the religious inherit the earth?" Back in 2009 he made some demographic projections for the US and concluded that, by 2050, immigration of religious people and their higher fertility will turn back the tide of secularisation (see Secularisation in the US will be swamped by religious fertility and immigration)

Now Kaufmann has taken a look at Europe. That's a bit more of a challenge because Europe is such a patchwork, and so good, comprehensive data are not so available.

He finds, as expected, that religion has declined in Europe. It began after WWII in Northern Europe, but only really got underway in Catholic countries in recent decades.

However, in the Protestant countries of Northern Europe, secularisation seems to have bottomed out at around 5% regular Church attenders and 40-50% who consider themselves to be religious (somewhat higher numbers believe in God).

But how to project the future? Well, one aspect is fertility. The religious have higher lifetime birth rates, but on the other hand the young are much more likely to be non-religious - and so have greater potential for begetting.

Then too you have to take into account switching into and out of religion. And here's where things get interesting. It turns out that Muslims have the highest fertility rates, and also are the most resistant to switching out.

Kaufmann focussed on Austria and Switzerland, two countries with the best data. Here, the non-religious have fertility rates of around 1, Protestants around 1.3, Catholics around 1.4, and Muslims around 2.4.

Plug this into the model and you get what's shown in the graph, which shows Muslims and non-affiliated in Switzerland and Austria under two scenarios.

Under the 'expected' model (which assumes current rates of switching out of religion are maintained), growth of the non-affililiated slows to zero by 2050.

Under the 'low decline' model (which assumes, based on the experiences of Northern European Countries, that the rate of switching out will slow to zero), the non-affiliated will actually be in decline as a percent of the population by 2050.

Now, the future is notoriously difficult to predict, and Kaufman lays out some of the many factors that could change these projections:

Major geopolitical changes could ease tension between Muslims and other Europeans; liberalizing theological shifts could pave the way for an increase in the rate of Muslim apostasy. Immigration could become ethnically controlled, as in Japan or Singapore, due to a surge of ethnic nationalism, thereby slowing the demographic growth of religion. A new vogue for family life might narrow the fertility gap between the secular and the religious. These changes would set European religious decline back on its formerly robust course.

One factor that interests me is the idea that a "new vogue for family life might narrow the fertility gap between the secular and the religious". Because one of the problems with these kinds of analyses is that the religious groups examined are far from homogenous.

So it is clear that some Protestant sects have more children than others. In the same way, some atheists have more children than others. Presumably those atheists who are family oriented will pass on that mindset to their children - which could influence future birth rates.

Another recent study, by Casey Borch and colleagues at the University of Alabama, helps to flesh out the picture a little. They split out mainline Protestants and conservative Protestants (aka Fundamentalists).

That's important, because the fertility rates of the mainline Protestants are only a little higher than those of the non-religious. Conservative Protestants have a much higher fertility rate - the graph shows the trends of fertility over time for the three main religious groups in the USA.

What's interesting is that, relative to Catholics, the fertility rates of both mainline and conservative Protestants seem to be dropping very slightly. However, somewhat bigger drops are seen among the non-religious and those of 'other religions'. So the fertility gap seems to be growing.

Will we see something similar in Europe? It's hard to say. What is known is that the very low rates of fertility seen in the 1990s seem to have been reversed in recent years, particularly in Northern Europe. That's because many couples chose to delay parenthood, rather than abandon it all together. Yet another complicating factor when trying to figure out fertility trends!

Kaufmann, E., Goujon, A., & Skirbekk, V. (2011). The End of Secularization in Europe?: A Socio-Demographic Perspective Sociology of Religion DOI: 10.1093/socrel/srr033

Borch, C., West, M., & Gauchat, G. (2011). Go Forth and Multiply: Revisiting Religion and Fertility in the United States, 1984-2008 Religions, 2 (4), 469-484 DOI: 10.3390/rel2040469

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

Does Chinese culture reflect a lack of monotheism?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:21:00 +0000

By now, most people will have heard the tragic case of Yueyue, the two-year old Chinese girl who was knocked down by two different drivers, lying for 7 minutes before any of the passers-by stopped to help. The case has caused a lot of soul-searching, in China and elsewhere. The best commentary I've read on it is this one by Lijia Zhang (who is, apparently, a rocket-factory worker turned freelance journalist!).

Zhang points out, as many other commentators have, that recent legal cases have resulted in punishments for good Samaritans. Unlike other commentators, Zhang doesn't just blame this on the communist past or on the recent transition to a market economy. In fact, it seems to have deep-seated historical precedents. Here, for example, is an account by John Barrow, a member of the first British embassy to Beijing in 1792:

In the course of our journey down the grand canal we had occasion to witness a scene, which was considered as a remarkable example of a want of fellow-feeling. Of the number of persons who had crowded down to the banks of the canal several had posted themselves upon the high projecting stern of an old vessel which, unfortunately, breaking down with the weight, the whole groupe tumbled with the wreck into the canal, just at the moment when the yachts of the embassy were passing. Although numbers of boats were sailing about the place, none were perceived to go to the assistance of those that were struggling in the water. They even seemed not to know that such an accident had happened, nor could the shrieks of the boys, floating on pieces of the wreck, attract their attention. One fellow was observed very busily employed in picking up, with his boat-hook, the hat of a drowning man (p283 of Travels in China).

Barrow gives a few other examples, and explains that this behaviour is entrenched in legal customs: under Chinese law of the time, good Samaritans were held legally responsible for anyone who died in their care:

...if a wounded man be taken into the protection and charge of any person with a view to effect his recovery, and he should happen to die under his hands, the person into whose care he was last taken is liable to be punished with death, unless he can produce undeniable evidence to prove how the wound was made, or that he survived it forty days.

So it's clearly not simply a modern malaise. Zhang blames a state of mind that is common in China, shaoguanxianshi, which is loosely translated as "don't get involved if it's not your business". As she explains:

In our culture, there's a lack of willingness to show compassion to strangers. We are brought up to show kindness to people in our network of guanxi, family and friends and business associates, but not particularly to strangers, especially if such kindness may potentially damage your interest.

Now this is something relevant to this blog, because what she's talking about here is our old friend altruism - specifically the peculiar form of altruism where people will help complete strangers even in anonymous situations. It's tough (but not impossible) to explain that in evolutionary terms, which has lead some people to propose that religion holds the key.

Basically, the idea is that the invention of monotheism allowed civilisation to step up a grade, by improving co-operation among unrelated individuals (see Did world religions help bring about complex societies?). Having a moralising, universal god encourages you to be nice to strangers, even when your evolutionarily-inspired instincts push you towards selfishness.

I've always been sceptical of the idea. Pure altruism can in fact be explained as a biological, rather than cultural, trait. But more importantly to me the suggestion seemed to smack of Western narrow-mindedness. Most psychology is done in the West, and so people who study the psychology of religion typically take our peculiar brand of religion to be 'normal'.

China, however, is a strong counterpoint to the claim that moralising, universal gods are needed for the establishment of co-operative mega-societies. Religion in China simply doe snot play the same role as it doe sin the West. Most religion is composed of a blend of philosophical life stances with localised folk myths.

And yet China is by anyone's standards an enormously successful mega-society, really without parallel in the World. As an example of large-scale co-operation among unrelated individuals, it really is a paragon of orderliness and stability.

And yet, the case of Yueye has got me thinking. I'm certainly no expert on Chinese psychology and culture. But if, as Zhang implies, there really is this profound cultural difference between China and other cultures, then maybe the type of religion really does have a meaningful effect on altruism.

To my knowledge, nobody has ever done a comparative study of pure altruism in China and the West.

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

In Toronto, Christian students are most likely to have unprotected sex

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:00:00 +0000

So, Christians aren't supposed to have sex before marriage (well depending on the variant of God they follow, of course). Just to be sure of it, they have an invisible policeman in the sky watching them at all times to make sure they don't deviate. On the other hand, Christian parents aren't so hot on teaching safe sex. Mash that up with university, when kids get let off the leash, and what happens? Well Trevor Hart at Ryerson University and a bunch of psychologists from the University of Toronto set out to find out.

Well, to be precise, what they really wanted to do was to separate out ethnicity and religion. The two are quite closely linked, especially in a multi-cultural place like Toronto. It's known that different ethnicities vary in their attitudes to sex, but perhaps it's really religion that's the deciding factor?

So anyway let's dig into the data. They quizzed 666 university students, most of them (nearly 80%) women, about their love lives. As you might expect, the atheists and agnostics were the most sexually active, followed by Christians and Jews, with Muslims and 'Eastern religions' (they didn't have many Buddhists, Hindus or Sikhs, so they lumped them all in together.

As far as unprotected sex (i.e. without a condom) goes, well it showed roughly the same pattern - except that the non-religious students ranked about the same as Christians and Jews.

However, all that doesn't take into account ethnicity, or indeed other factors like whether the students were in a relationship (and whether it was long term), whether they knew about HIV and that condoms reduce transmission. Throwing all this into the analysis gave some clear results.

Firstly, ethnicity isn't important. Taking all the other factors into account, Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Middle Easterns are all just as likely to have unprotected sex.

What did matter was religion. Christianity, and especially Catholicism, was the biggest risk factor. Atheism too, but to a much lesser extent. Jews, Muslims and 'Eastern religions' were all similarly safe.

Part of the reason for this is that Muslim students and those of Eastern religions just don't really fornicate much. When they restricted the analysis just to those students who were sexually active, then they found that Christians were about twice as likely as the non-religious to have unprotected sex.

So what this study shows is that religion does actually seem to stop kids from having unprotected sex by scaring them off sex altogether - but only for Eastern religions and for Muslims.

Christian kids are trapped, however. They live and participate in a liberal, permissive society, but their upbringing doesn't prepare them for it. As a result, they are placed at high risk for unsafe sex.

James, C., Hart, T., Roberts, K., Ghai, A., Petrovic, B., & Lima, M. (2010). Religion versus ethnicity as predictors of unprotected vaginal intercourse among young adults Sexual Health DOI: 10.1071/SH09119

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

For atheists, the dead can live - but only if there's no corpse

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 20:45:00 +0000

In a fascinating new study psychologists Kurt Gray (University of Maryland), Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner (Harvard University) have shown that people regard brain-dead individuals as less mentally aware than individuals who are completely, stone-cold dead. That's weird enough, but the interaction with atheism is weirder still!

They ran a few experiments, all with a similar set up. People were told about two different dead people, one in a persistent vegetative state (i.e. brain dead), and the other one dead and buried. For example, David has a car accident, and then either dies, or his "entire brain was destroyed, except for the one part that keeps him breathing. So while his body is still technically alive, he will never wake up again."

People tend to accept that the dead are likely to be mentally impaired. They're less likely to be aware of their environment, have emotions, a personality, to remember events from their life, be able to influence current events, know right from wrong.

Bizarrely enough, however, the dead score higher on all of these than the brain dead. In the words of Gray et al, the brain-dead are more dead than dead!

Of course, not everyone thinks this way, and here's where it gets really interesting.

Instead of just saying that David died in the car accident, they embellished the story to go into details of what happened to the body: "After being embalmed at the morgue, he was buried in the local cemetery. David now lies in a coffin underground." And they also asked people how religious they were.

The graphic shows the results. For the religious, it didn't matter whether they just said David was dead, or went into details about the corpse. Religious folks thought that David's mind survived regardless - except course, if he was brain dead. Dead people have a mind, brain-dead people don't.

For the non-religious, the corpse mattered. If there was a corpse, then David's mind was dead - just as dead as if he was brain dead. That's good - that's what the non-religious are supposed to say. Dead people don't think.

But if they didn't mention the corpse, well then even the non-religious were tempted to say that David's disembodied mind persisted somehow. They weren't as confident as the religious, but there seems to be a nagging suspicion that David's mind lingered on after death.

Gray and colleagues conclude that this is more evidence that we have an instinctive belief in mind-body dualism. Because brain dead people still have a living, breathing body, our instinctive thoughts about the mind become confused, and we get to thinking that the mind has been destroyed in some way that's even more severe than actual death.

The non-religious, like the religious, tend to think of dead people having a mind. However, "Emphasizing the body of the deceased allowed non-religious participants to understand death as a state without mind"

Gray, K., Anne Knickman, T., & Wegner, D. (2011). More dead than dead: Perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state Cognition, 121 (2), 275-280 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2011.06.014

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

Religion stops authoritarians from telling white lies

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:21:00 +0000

Is it ever OK to lie? If they are honest' people would say "yes". After all small lies, done for the greater good, are what lubricates many social interactions. In fact, lying is probably one of the key things that sets us apart from other animals.

Of course, lying is also socially destructive, which is why there are strong cultural pressures against lying. That creates a quandary, since you have to use your judgement about when to contravene social norms.

Vassilis Saroglou and Matthieu Van Pachterbeke, psychologists at Université catholique de Louvain, have previously shown that authoritarians (people characterised by conservative ideology and submission to established authorities) tend to disapprove of lying even when it might result in benefit to an associate and no overall harm to wider society.

So, they wanted to know whether religious people are the same and, even more importantly, whether there was an interaction between religion and authoritarianism. You see, religiosity and authoritarianism quite often go hand-in-hand, so it's not clear which is having the effect on lying.

The experimental set-up was straightforward. First the subjects (who were recruited by a student asking around friends and neighbours!) were given a word search puzzle to do.

This word search either had religious words to find, or non-religious words. That way, half the subjects were primed with religion, and half were not.

Then they were given a series of nine moral dilemmas to answer. Here's one, for example:

You visit a friend who has been hospitalized for one year due to late-stage cancer. He spent his life running a small industry. He is very proud of it, having started it from nothing and expanding it to having, one year ago, 60 workers in a familial atmosphere. The person handed the management of this firm on to his son just after his cancer diagnosis, hoping that his son would carry on his work. The patient asks you for news about the firm. You know that, aiming gains, his son sold the firm to a multinational that restructured it. Do you tell the patient or do you lie?

They weren't all explicitly about lying, although they did involve breaking the rules and not telling the whole truth in some minor way (like not reporting an acquaintance who is a foreign student to the police who are looking for him to deport him following a car accident).

Anyway, what they found was interesting, and the graphic basically tells the story.

For people who didn't get the religious prime, authoritarianism didn't matter. Authoritarians and non-authoritarians were equally comfortable in being a little bit disopbedient.

For non-authoritarians, the religious prime didn't matter. Religious priming didn't make non-authoritarians obey the rules any better.

But for authoritarians, there was an effect. Priming them with religion made them significantly more likely to obey abstract social norms, even to the detriment of their associates.

Now, it wasn't a huge effect, but then you wouldn't really expect to see a large effect from such a trivial set-up.

But it is a critically important effect. What it says is that religious activates authoritarianism - at least for these Belgians. Unprompted, the moral decisions of authoritarians and liberals were similar.

Subtly remind the authoritarians of religion, however, and they ramp up their moral righteousness!

Van Pachterbeke, M., Freyer, C., & Saroglou, V. (2011). When authoritarianism meets religion: Sacrificing others in the name of abstract deontology European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.834

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

Supernatural explanations just don't occur to kids - they need to be taught them

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 20:58:00 +0000

It's pretty much taken as an assumption these days that human beings are 'natural-born believers'. Ask a cognitive scientist who specializes in religion, and they will tell you that our brains are predisposed to all sorts of supernatural concepts.

One consequence of this consensus is a vast outpouring of articles and books pondering over what the evolutionary advantages of religion are. A lot of these explanations are pretty tendentious, and to me it has never seemed likely that this was the whole story.

One popular way to investigate the 'naturalness' of religion problem is to see if supernatural concepts are hardwired into children - as you would expect if religious ideas are intuitive and naturalistic ideas have to be learned. Perhaps surprisingly there are very few studies to support this idea - the same 'classic' studies keep getting recycled in each new article or book.

And when independent researchers outside the core groups test the hypothesis, they often get results that don't fit the story. That's the case with a new study by Jacqui Woolley, a psychologist at the University of Texas.

She and her colleagues read some short tales to a bunch of kids (67 in total) aged 8, 10 or 12, and also 22 adults. All the stories illustrated a 'difficult to explain' event.

For example, one featured a guy who steals a little money regularly, until he has enough money to buy a really fast car - which he promptly crashes. Another featured a terminal cancer patient whose cancer went away 'miraculously'. And another featured a woman who jogged regularly, and yet on her wedding day she tripped and hurt her leg badly - thus making her miss her wedding and also stopped her running. The stories were designed to illustrate events that could be ascribed to moral justice, divine intervention, or luck/fate.

So they read these stories and then asked the listener how the event could be explained. The surprising thing was that the kids hardly ever offered up supernatural explanations. Instead, they would say that maybe the cancer patient slept a lot, which helped her get better. Or, for the athletic woman who tripped on her wedding day, “because she tripped over a rock while she was walking. People usually trip over stuff and fall.”

Adults, on the other hand, readily offered up supernatural explanations. There was a clear trend, too, as you can see in the graph - the older the child, the more likely they were to explain these strange happenings by recourse to the supernatural

Then Woolley and Co. put some suggested explanations to them. The kids tended to agree that god or other supernatural explanations were plausible (although they felt that god explanations were more likely for stories with happy outcomes). So it's not that they aren't aware of the concepts - it just that they don't occur to them spontaneously.

Crucially, even the religious kids were more likely to provide naturalistic explanations than supernatural ones. They were, it's true, more likely to give supernatural explanations than the non-religious, and they were also more likely to give god-based explanations - but according to Woolley even this relationship only becomes significant at around age 12.

This doesn't of course, mean that humans are not predisposed to think supernaturally. Clearly, in some circumstances we are - and it seems likely that some people are more predisposed to think supernaturally than others.

But what this, along with other evidence, does show is that it is far too simplistic to argue that we are 'born believers'. In fact, we are born with a wide range of tools with which to understand the world around us, and culture is critical for shaping how those predispositions are shaped into beliefs.

Woolley, J., Cornelius, C., & Lacy, W. (2011). Developmental Changes in the Use of Supernatural Explanations for Unusual Events Journal of Cognition and Culture, 11 (3), 311-337 DOI: 10.1163/156853711X591279

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