Epiphenom

Religion boosts self control

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Kevin Rounding (Queen's University, Ontario, Canada) has run a series of experiments which suggest that religious beliefs can actually boost your ability to stay focussed and resist temptation.

For example, they found that students primed with religious thoughts were able to drink more cups of a disgusting orange juice/vinegar blend (they were offered 5c for every 25 mL they drank).

Religiously primed students were also more likely to put off receiving a reward of $5 now, in order to receive a larger reward in the future. This is known as 'delayed gratification', and is an important indicator of whether people can achieve goals and carry out long-term plans.

In another study, they wore out their students brains by giving them a typing task for which they had to concentrate very hard - while loud music was pumped out at them! Those students who were subsequently primed with religion kept plugging away longer at the next task.

In the last study, they get their students to do the Stroop Test. This is a test where the subjects are shown colour words ("red", "blue" etc) that are themselves written in different colours. The challenge is to say what the colour of the text is, and ignore the actual word.

The idea behind this test is that quicker answers suggest more focused control. And this test also gets away from one possible criticism of the previous studies - that they are measuring adherence to some kind of social expectation, rather than self-control per se.

Sure enough, priming with religion decreased response times, while priming with moral concepts or with death concepts had no effect (as shown in the graphic).

Now, all this chimes with previous research which found that priming with specific god concepts (a controlling god, rather than a more hands-off god) can increase the ability to resist temptation while decreasing the drive to actually achieve important life goals.

And other research has shown that priming with god concepts can drive people to keep working away at impossible tasks.

However, I'm less convinced by the Stroop test in this study. Michael Inzlich (University of Toronto) has previously found that religious prompts make people less anxious about making mistakes on this test.

Perhaps in this study all that was happening was that people primed with religion made faster responses because they were less anxious about getting it wrong?

So are we seeing genuine effects on self-control, or just enhanced drive to fulfil social expectations? I don't know, but either effect is pretty interesting!

Rounding, K., Lee, A., Jacobson, J., & Ji, L. (2012). Religion Replenishes Self-Control Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797611431987

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

Repetitious magic rituals are thought to be more effective

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 26 May 2012 21:01:00 +0000

Magical rituals - routines designed to bring about a real-world effect, like curing disease or cursing a rival - have been part of human society since as far back as anyone can tell. So, as a species, we've had plenty of time to sort out what works and what doesn't.

But the question is, do people have a gut feeling for what makes a good ritual? To find out, Cristine Legare (University of Texas at Austin) headed to the city of Belo Horizonte, located in the south-eastern region of Brazil. Brazilian culture is suffused with all sorts of magical rituals - they call them simpatias. Here's an example:

“Buy a new sharp knife and stick it four times into a banana tree on June 12th at midnight (i.e., Valentine’s day in Brazil, Saint Anthony’s day is on the 13th). Catch the liquid that will drip from the plant’s wound on a crisp, white paper that has been folded in two. The dripping liquid captured on the paper at night will form the first letter of the name of your future partner”

Working with a colleague, she created a large number of variations of real simpatia. Each was modified so as to accentuate one of nine different characteristics:

specificity of time
specificity of place
specificity of material
repetition of procedures
number of procedural steps
number of items used
edibility (presence or absence of edible items)
digestibility (presence or absence of any sort of ingestion)
religious icon (presence or absence of a religious icon).

Then she asked the locals which of these rituals was the most effective. It turned out that varying most of these characteristics had no effect on the perceived efficacy of the rituals.

However, she find that simpatia that insist on a specific time, or that have more individual steps and more repetitions of those steps, or that specify the involvement of a supernatural agent, were thought to be more effective.

But perhaps this is just about simpatias in that cultural context, and not about magical rituals in general?

So Legare tested these same simpatias on US college students, and found pretty similar results. At least, all the trends were the same, although statistically it wasn't as robust because the US students were less likely to think that any of the rituals would have any effect. College education does pay off after all!

Legare thinks that the the problem with magical rituals is that it's very hard to know whether or not they work. So, in the absence of evidence, we tend to go for ones that intuitively seem more likely to work. And that means ones with more steps and more repetitions.

After all, if doing something once has some effect, then repeating it has to have a greater effect - and so we prefer rituals that hyper-activate our instinctive understanding of cause and effect.

And appealing to a supernatural being has surely got to help, too!

Legare CH, & Souza AL (2012). Evaluating ritual efficacy: Evidence from the supernatural. Cognition, 124 (1), 1-15 PMID: 22520061

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

For less-religious Americans, compassion is a significant factor in prosocial behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 21 May 2012 21:05:00 +0000

Apologies if you saw this one when it came out last month, but it's an interesting study that really deserves a closer look!

Laura Saslow (University of California at San Francisco) and colleagues wanted to know whether compassion influenced the prosocial tendencies (altruism, generosity, trust etc) of the religious and non religious. So they ran three different studies - different groups of people, and different tests.

In the first, they found that across the USA (looking at data from the 2004 General Survey), religious people were slightly more likely to say that they did prosocial things like giving food or money to a homeless person, returning money after getting too much change, allowing a stranger to go ahead in line, volunteering time for a charity, etc. They were also more likely to say that they were compassionate (for example, that they often have tender, concerned feelings for less fortunate people, or that when they see someone being taken advantage of, they feel kind of protective towards them).

Now, that's not too surprising - it's been known for a long time that religious people report being more prosocial (although whether they are is another matter!). However the interesting finding is that the difference between compassionate and non-compassionate people was much bigger for the less religious than for the more religious.

In a second study, they asked American adults to watch one of two videos. The first was about child poverty, the second was just a clip of two guys talking. Then they were asked various apparently non-related things - like how much salary should be spent on charity, or how much they would donate in the Dictator Game.

Once again, the more religious participants said that they were somewhat more prosocial, but they were not not affected by the video. The result was that less religious who had watched the video reported being more prosocial than the more religious (regardless of whether they had watched the video).

In the final study, they brought a group of students to the lab and asked them how compassionate they were feeling right now. Then they got them to go through a battery of games designed to test prosocial behaviour - basically these are all variants of the "Prisoners Dilemma", in which the subjects have to give money, or bet money in the hope that their anonymous co-players will reciprocate.

As you can see in the graphic, for the less religious Americans prosociality was much higher in those who said they were feeling compassionate. For the more religious Americans, prosociality was pretty much the same - or maybe even a little less.

The authors think these results suggest that the less religious are bound to others by emotional connection. They go on to say that:

The more religious, on the other hand, may ground their generosity less in emotion and more in other factors such as doctrine, a communal identity, or reputational concerns.

That seems likely. In fact, I think there's probably an additional factor here - because these studies took place in the USA, where religion is the social norm.

It could be that religious people assume that the recipients of their generosity are co-religionists - in most US communities, that's a pretty strong likelihood. Therefore pro-social behaviour is less about pure altruism and more about group norms of back scratching and favours being returned - reciprocal altruism.

Atheists, on the other hand, may feel like outsiders, and so be less inclined to be pro-social - unless they are in a compassionate frame of mind for some reason.

Saslow, L., Willer, R., Feinberg, M., Piff, P., Clark, K., Keltner, D., & Saturn, S. (2012). My Brother's Keeper? Compassion Predicts Generosity More Among Less Religious Individuals Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612444137

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

Distrust of atheists is reduced if people have confidence in law and order

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:15:00 +0000

If you read this blog regularly, you'll have come across work by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Previously, they've shown that atheists in North America are are disliked because they are distrusted, and that untrustworthy people are often assumed to be atheists.

Why the distrust? Well, it's partly because they are an unknown quantity - many Americans never come across an open atheists - but also partly because people who think they are being watched at least claim to be trustworthy. Probably they think that other people will be trustworthy too, if they think they are being watched by a supernatural agent.

In new research, they've shown that the distrust that religious people have of atheists can at least partly be eased by subtly persuading them that the police are effective in stopping crime.

For example, in the study shown in the graphic, they showed students a video about police effectiveness and then, in a follow up survey, asked how distrustful they were of atheists and whether they disliked gays, Muslims or Jews. After they watched the video, their distrust of atheists dropped away.

Their prejudice towards other didn't change, however. In other studies, they also showed that distrust of gays was also not improved by this kind of manipulation, suggesting that it was specifically distrust of atheists that was being affected.

So this suggests that while religious people think that belief in god makes a person trustworthy, they're also open to the idea that secular authorities can also be a source of order and safety.

This puts me in mind of some other research by Aaron Kay and colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. They showed that, by pumping up belief that the government is in control, the desire to believe in a controlling god is weakened.

All more good evidence that one important factor that draws people to belief in God is fear and anxiety, and that stable social systems that are common in wealthy countries are contributing to the increasing numbers of non-believers.

Gervais, W., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Reminders of Secular Authority Reduce Believers' Distrust of Atheists Psychological Science, 23 (5), 483-491 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611429711

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

Jesus shares your political views - but is more extreme

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 13 May 2012 20:54:00 +0000

Lee Ross, a Psychologist at Stanford University in California, and colleagues have polled over 1,200 Americans about their political views, and also what opinions they thought Jesus held.

Unsurprisingly, liberals thought Jesus was generally a pretty liberal guy, while conservatives thought he was rather conservative. How can this be, when they read the same Bible?

Well in fact, liberals did think that Jesus was a shade more conservative than they were, and the conservatives did think he was a shade more liberal.So there was some meeting of minds.

But still the gap was huge. American Christians tend to think that Jesus shares their political persuasion.

Now, you won't be too surprised about that. However, it does make you wonder how they manage to have such radically different ideas.

After all, they are presumably fairly aware that others in their society have radically different ideas about Jesus' opinions.So how do they reconcile that with their own beliefs?

Well, when you drill down into specific political issues, the picture gets a bit clearer.

You see, liberals are more in favour than conservatives of taxing the wealthy and easing the burdens on illegal immigrants. And both liberals and conservatives think that Jesus is more liberal than them on these issues.

In other words, liberals think that Jesus is even more liberal than they are on their core issues of fellowship and compassion.

In contrast, conservatives are more in favour than liberals of banning gay marriage and limiting access to abortion. And both liberals and conservatives think that Jesus is more conservative than them on these issues.

So conservatives think that Jesus is even more conservative than they are on their core issues of morality.

What's happening here is that both groups seem to have come to an understanding that Jesus is liberal on fellowship issues and conservative on moral issues. Liberals feel tension (cognitive dissonance) because they are not living up to Jesus' conservative views on morality. Conservatives feel similar tension about Jesus' fellowship views.

So, to reduce this tension, the liberals have convinced themselves that they are failing to live up to Jesus' liberal views, and the conservatives have convinced themselves that they are failing to live up to Jesus' conservative views.

And so, both groups can carry on believing that that they are doing their best to fulfill Jesus' edicts, even if they occasionally fall short!

Ross, L., Lelkes, Y., & Russell, A. (2012). How Christians reconcile their personal political views and the teachings of their faith: Projection as a means of dissonance reduction Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109 (10), 3616-3622 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1117557109

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

Non-religious more likely to donate their bodies to science and organs to other people

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 08 May 2012 21:32:00 +0000

Here's a simple, but compelling study. Jon Cornwall (University of Otago, New Zealand) and colleagues from Ireland and South Africa surveyed 200 people who had registered to donate their body to science in those three countries.

They found that body donors mostly (80%) cited a desire to aid medical science as the main reason for wishing to
donate their body. They tended to be older (over 60), and to have been in long-term partnerships (either currently or previously). They were also more likely than the general population to report giving time or money to charity, and to be blood donors or organ donors.

And they were more likely than the general population to report no religious affiliation. As the graphic shows, the percentage of body donors without a religious affiliation, although less than 50%, was much higher than expected in each country (the difference is statistically significant in each case).

Now, there could be all sorts of reasons for this - there was no attempt to adjust for the other differences between donors and the rest of the population. However, in general you'd expect older people with a history of giving to charity to be more likely to be religious, not less likely.

There is an exception, however. Religious people are no more likely to be blood donors than the non-religious, and they seem less likely to sign up to be organ donors.

But it's not just about giving. A recent study in the Netherlands also supports the idea that the non-religious are the most likely to buy into the idea of being an organ recipient, as well as an organ donor.

So is there something special about donating body tissue? Well I suspect there might be. Maybe what is affecting judgements here is essentialism - the idea that all things (especially living things) have some kind of soul or essence that defines them.

After all, if a kidney transplant can make you speak a foreign language, or a heart transplant make you commit suicide, then you need to be a bit cautious!

And perhaps, despite the theological teachings that say a dead body is empty, perhaps ordinary folk-religion takes a different perspective.

Cornwall, J., Perry, G., Louw, G., & Stringer, M. (2012). Who donates their body to science? An international, multicenter, prospective study Anatomical Sciences Education DOI: 10.1002/ase.1278

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

International religion league tables - who's up, who's down? And why.

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:02:00 +0000

You may have seen the recent splurge of news stories about how religious different countries are. Depending on where you looked, you may have come away thinking either that belief is in decline worldwide, that Catholic countries are the most religious, or even (and this one is quite bizarre) that people get more religious as they get older. Unless you were reading carefully, you may not even have realised they were talking about the same report!

In fact, the report (which you can read yourself here) shows a pretty fragmented picture with no clear worldwide trends - which is probably why time pressured journalists are finding it tough to get a handle on what it actually says (or alternatively: reading into it what they want to see).

So what is this report anyway? Well, Tom Smith (University of Chicago) has analysed the latest religion survey from the International Social Survey Programme (done in 2008) and compared it with similar surveys done in 1998 and 1991.

Now this survey mostly looks at Europe, which has become less religious over that time. But there's only a few non-European countries, so it doesn't tell us much about the rest of the world. China, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Brazil - none of these major countries are included.

But it does tell us some interesting things about why different countries are heading in different directions. Take a look at the graphic, where I've picked out a few interesting cases.

Starting on the left, you can see that Australia and Ireland now have fewer people who are certain that god exists, Israel and Russia have more, while the USA has pretty much held constant.

Population changes in religious belief can happen for three reasons: conversion, fertility rates, and immigration.

So take a look at the next panel. This shows how many people said “I believe in God now, but I didn’t use to.”
minus those who said “I don’t believe in God now, but I used to”. In Australia, more people have converted to atheism, whereas in Russia, more people have converted to belief. Overall, there does not seem to be much net conversion in the other countries.

Now take a look at the next panel. This illustrates the ages of people who say that they have always been an atheist. In Australia and Ireland, they tend to be younger. What this shows is that increasingly, people are being born into atheism as a result of conversion of previous generations (the absolute percentage points are small for Ireland, because there aren't many atheists - but the trend is there).

Now look at people who say they are lifelong believers. In Australia and Ireland, they tend to be old. That supports the idea that the religious culture is becoming a thing of the past.

In Israel, however, you see the opposite effect. There, lifelong atheists are older, and lifelong believers are younger - even though there is little net conversion. It seems likely that this is happening because of the high birth rates among orthodox Jews in Israel.

The USA basically follows the pattern of Australia and Ireland (and Europe), and so I think the future for the USA is in the same direction as these countries.

Russia, however, is showing an upsurge in religion due to conversion over the 20 years since the collapse of communism. Lifelong atheists and lifelong believers both tend to be older, reflecting the state of flux in this country as people dabble with different life stances.

Interestingly, the other ex-communist nations surveyed show different trends. Although there tends to be net conversion to religion (except the Czech republic), East European countries tend to have a preponderance of older lifelong believers and younger lifelong atheist - so a non-religious future seems likely for these countries.

But overall, I think what we are seeing here is a balancing out. Non-religious countries are becoming more religious, while religious Europe is becoming less religious. Israel, meanwhile, is going its own way!

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

Bad fonts decrease belief in God

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:02:00 +0000

So, do you believe in God? OK, well how about if I ask it like this: Do you believe in God?

Surprisingly, according to a new study by Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan at the University of British Columbia in Canada,simply changing the font used to write the questions (to make them more difficult to read) can actually make you more likely to answer 'No'.

The explanation, they think, is that when the text is hard to read, we have to concentrate harder. We step our analytical brain up a gear, and quash our instinctive reactions.

In fact this effect, known as cognitive disfluency, has been shown in other studies to trigger analytic thinking strategies.

There's good reason to think that triggering analytic thinking might reduce religious belief. Two recent studies (one last year and one last week) have shown that people who are stronger in analytical thinking are also less likely to believe in god - even after controlling for basic intelligence.

But what's new in Gervais and Norenzayan's study is that they showed that you can manipulate this. They found that subtly encouraging people (well, Canadian students) to think critically also encourages disbelief.

For example, showing them a picture of Rodin's "The Thinker" (on the left) versus one of Discobolus, reduced reported belief in God by around one third.

Doing a word puzzle which featured words like "analyze", "reason", "ponder", and "think" had a similar, although somewhat smaller, effect (reducing belief in supernatural agents and also reported religiosity by around 20%).

And, in the font study, they found that simply using a greyed out, italic font was enough to have the same effect. Students who were made to read the questionnaire in a difficult font were around 20% less likely to report belief in God, the Devil, and angels.

So, has anyone else noticed that newspapers are a lot easier to read than they were at the beginning of last century? I wonder what effect that has had!

Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan. Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. Science 2012 336, 493-496.

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

Are secular alternatives to religious gatherings any good?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:41:00 +0000

It's often suggested that religion benefits people by bringing them together and helping to create and bind communities. Since most humans are highly social, having a mechanism to strengthen social groups could be expected to have psychological and even health benefits.

Indeed, this has often been shown to be the case. People who go to church more often seem to be happier on average, and any health benefits of religion are related to church going, rather than religious beliefs.

Now, there are complex cause and effect problems here – perhaps it’s simply that people go to church are happier and healthier to start with. These issues are hard to untangle.

However, given the controversy over Alain de Botton’s proposals in his recent book (that atheists should form secular ‘Churches’, to provide that social service provided currently by religion), it’s worth taking a look at whether secular alternatives to religion actually have any measurable impact on happiness.

The most obvious secular parallel to religion is organised sport – and in particular membership of clubs that support particular teams.

Gaelle Encrenaz, at the Universitié Victor Segalen in Bordeaux, France, and colleagues have looked at the suicide rate in France during the Football World Cup of 1998. In that competition, which was held in France, the French team came through against the odds to win an unexpected victory.

They found that the suicide rate decreased significantly as the world cup progressed. In fact, the day after the French team played a match, the suicide rate dropped by 20%.

Encrenaz explains this by the increased social integration that the matches brought about:

… the level of social integration considerably rose during the 1998 World Cup in France. People spent more time with friends and others watching matches at home, in bars, or in front of giant television screens. Each French winning game was followed by gathering on the streets to celebrate

… Moreover, a rise in solidarity among French people from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds was observed. The concept "black-blanc-beur" (Black-White-Maghrebi) was created on the pattern of the national colors to describe the multi-ethnicity of the team and the nation’s unity in diversity

… Watching games might increase a sense of belonging, allow for release of tension, and induce positive mood …

These results back up findings from elsewhere in the world: the incidence of suicide in the United States is lower on Super Bowl Sundays compared with other Sundays (Joiner et al., 2006), suicide rates among young, single males in Canada is higher after the early elimination of the local hockey team from the Stanley Cup (Trovato, 1998).

Singing as a group also seems to provide a happiness boost. Stephen Clift and Paul Camic (Canterbury Christ Church University, UK) and colleagues surveyed 1,124 people in Australia, England and Germany, all of whom took part in choral singing groups.

They found that people who took part in the singing felt that it gave them social benefits, emotional benefits, and also added meaning and purpose to their lives. These benefits were widely reported, irrespective of nationality, sex, age or mental well-being. A previous study has shown that the simple act of singing as a group can increase group cohesion.

What these studies demonstrate, albeit in a provisional way, is that secular group activities seem to have tangible effects on mental well being. Is that an argument for secular churches? I don’t know, but I think it certainly boosts the case for atheists and humanists to actively promote the kind of open-admission, group activities that churches currently provide.

Livesey, L., Morrison, I., Clift, S., &; Camic, P. (2012). Benefits of choral singing for social and mental wellbeing: qualitative findings from a cross-national survey of choir members Journal of Public Mental Health, 11 (1), 10-26 DOI: 10.1108/17465721211207275

Encrenaz, G., Contrand, B., Leffondré, K., Queinec, R., Aouba, A., Jougla, E., Miras, A., & Lagarde, E. (2012). Impact of the 1998 Football World Cup on Suicide Rates in France: Results from the National Death Registry Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 42 (2), 129-135 DOI: 10.1111/j.1943-278X.2011.00076.x

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

Instinctive thinkers more likely to believe in a personal god – and less likely to be atheists

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Late last year some fascinating research revealed that people who take a more deliberative approach to problem solving – rather than just going with their instincts – are also less religious. Now some independent research not only confirms those findings, but also extends them to show how there is a progressive link between thinking style and decreasing religious beliefs.

Gordon Pennycook, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, ran the test on 267 people from around the world (mostly North America and the UK) . The basic set up was the same as the previous study.

They gave people a series of three questions, which each had an intuitive, wrong answer. To get the correct answer, you typically need to think around the problem a little.

So, for example, one question asks “A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” The intuitive answer is $0.10, but the correct answer is $0.05.

The key results are shown in the figure. People who believe in a personal god are disproportionately likely to have got every question wrong.

Pantheists, who believe in god as an impersonal force, did better. Deists, who believe in an impersonal god who does not intervene in the universe, did better still, and agnostics even better. Atheists were the most likely to give correct answers.

So deep thinkers, even if they weren’t atheists, were less likely to believe in the conventional idea of a personal god, and more likely to have unconventional religious ideas. Pennycook also showed that deep thinkers were less likely to be involved in religious activities, and that this could be explained largely on the basis of lower belief in a personal god.

They also measured paranormal beliefs, and found that although these were broadly correlated with religious beliefs, many people are believers in either one or the other. Yet paranormal belief was also lower in people who got more questions right.

Both of these effects – on religion and paranormal beliefs – held even after controlling for factors such as age, sex, education and IQ.

In other words, conventional intelligence (problem solving, understanding words) was less important than having a considered, deliberative approach to problem solving.

Now, you may interpret this as evidence that religious ideas are intuitive, but Pennycook disagrees. He suggests that the problem is that many religious ideas are actually counterintuitive. Deep thinkers maybe don’t take these ideas at face value, and so are more likely to dig into the problem and so come to a different conclusion.

Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J., Seli, P., Koehler, D., & Fugelsang, J. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief Cognition, 123 (3), 335-346 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003

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

Religion facilitates learning about omniscience – but it still has to be learned

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 20:38:00 +0000

Recently, the New Scientist published a special ‘God’ issue(behind pay wall) arguing that religion is natural and beneficial to society. All very interesting, but several of the articles gave quite a one-sided view of several issues (properly speaking, they were opinion pieces written by leading scientists advocating their particular view point).

Take, for example, the article by Justin Barrett, arguing that children have an innate understanding of omniscience. That’s an important question, because if we have a built-in appreciation of the thorny concept of omniscience, then this suggests that religious, and in particular Judaeo-Christian, beliefs are intuitive.

Barrett cites research by himself and others that supports this view. Broadly speaking, the idea is that young children start off by thinking that everyone has god-like powers of omniscience, and that they have to learn that mortals (like their mum) have in fact only limited knowledge.

However, there are actually just as many studies that conflict with this idea. In particular, one I covered on this blog before suggests a more complex picture. What this research, by Jonathan Lane at the University of Michigan, suggests is that in fact very young children simply assume that you know everything they know.

When they get older, they learn that others don’t know everything they know. However, crucially, they make the same assumption about God. It’s only later, when they’ve learnt about omniscience, that they can correctly ascribed these powers to God.

Lane’s most recent work basically replicates the original, with the interesting twist that the second study was done in children who had attended religious Protestant Christian preschools.

The results they got were basically the same as the first study, with one key difference (the previous study is at the top, the new one underneath). The kids who had been to a religious preschool were able to correctly say that Mr Smart can know things that you (and in fact no ordinary human) can not.

In short, they understood omniscience at an earlier age.

Intriguingly, they didn’t spontaneously attribute omniscience to God, only to ‘Mr Smart’. That’s probably because they were specifically told that Mr Smart “knows everything”, whereas they weren’t told anything about god.

What that means is that they understood the concept of omniscience, even though they hadn't yet learned to automatically associate that idea with god.

When quizzing the children further, Lane also found that those who had more sophisticated knowledge of God’s abilities actually were more likely to understand the extraordinary powers of the other agents (Heroman, Mr Smart). It seems that the training about god they received from an early age does help them to understand the idea of extraordinary powers – but these ideas still have to be developed (they’re not innate).

Lane concludes: "…data from the current study provide compelling evidence that when children begin to understand the cognitive limitations of humans, they typically attribute those same limitations to God, and this applies even to religiously exposed children.

Only later, at around age 5 years did religiously exposed children reliably differentiate between humans’ fallible mental abilities and inaccurate mental states versus God’s less fallible abilities and states.

These results suggest that in their everyday reasoning, even children who are raised in religious settings often initially understand God’s mind as constrained and fallible, very similar to their understanding of ordinary human minds."

So children have to develop an understanding of omniscience, even if they are raised in a religious environment. However, when raised in a religious environment, they seem to understand omniscience earlier - evidence of the importance of learning, as well as brain maturation.

Lane, J., Wellman, H., & Evans, E. (2012). Sociocultural Input Facilitates Children’s Developing Understanding of Extraordinary Minds Child Development DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2012.01741.x
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

How fear and anxiety leads to more religion - a presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:15:00 +0000

On Saturday I gave a presentation in Bournemouth to the Dorset Humanists, on the topic 'Fear and God'. In the talk I review many of the studies I've covered on this blog, looking at how and why fear and anxiety provoke religious responses, and the link between unstable and dangerous societies with greater levels of religion. I also look at some of the consequences of the anxiolytic effects of religion on behaviour.

The talk is aimed at a general, non-scientific audience (although it does cover a lot of science), so if you're looking for an easy to digest introduction to this topic, then you might find this interesting! The talk itself runs for 50 minutes, with another 20 minutes of questions at the end.

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

Religious people believe in a just world

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Believers in a just world think that things happen for a reason. In particular, they are more likely than other people to think that victims of crime are in some way responsible for what happened to them, that the poor are poor because of their own actions, and that sick people have done something to cause their illnesses.

You might expect that people who believe in an omnipotent, purpose-giving god might might also be 'just world' believers, but in fact there is not a lot of hard evidence. A couple of studies have found that highly religious Catholics and Protestants do tend to blame victims, but another study found no evidence of this relationship among Germans.

A new study, by Molly VanDeursen and colleagues at St Louis University, Missouri, has added to the evidence, but with some twists. They interviewed 86 undergraduates, and put the following scenario to them:

Ms. Brown, a woman in her mid 30’s, had to work late one night. On the way to her car, she was approached by a man with a gun who commanded that she give him her purse, keys, and cell phone. He took everything from her and then forced her to show him where her car was parked. He proceeded to get in her car and drive off with all her possessions, keeping the gun pointed on her the entire time and leaving her stranded in the parking garage.

They ended the story in two different ways. Half the students were told that the mugger was caught and punished. The other half were told that he was never caught.

This last option was designed to really pump up their 'just world' feelings. Sure enough, those who were told that the mugger was not caught were more likely to blame Ms Brown for what happened.

Broadly speaking, the more religious students also tended to think Ms Brown's personality and behaviour was at least partly responsible for the mugging, that she would get some benefits from being mugged (presumably, learning a valuable lesson). They were also more likely to say that they would be willing to help her by giving her money, and that the mugger was a bad person.

However, this was really only true for the so-called "extrinsically" religious. These are the people who view religion as a tool to achieve their goals in life (people who go to church to be seen, because it is the social norm in their society, conferring respectability or social advancement).

For the intrinsically religious (those for whom religion is an end in itself, who are internally motivated), were more likely to say that Ms Brown would benefit from being mugged, and were more likely to vilify the mugger and offer Ms Brown money - what's more, this effect got stronger if they were told the mugger wasn't caught. But they weren't more likely that then non-intrinsically religious to attribute the mugging to Ms Brown's personality and behaviour.

With such small groups, it's hard to read too much into this study. After all, the so-called 'extrinsically religious' may differ from the intrinsics in other ways - social class, or background, for example. And this study didn't compare the non-religious with the religious, so we can't say this is actually an effect of religion.

Nevertheless, it does point to the likelihood that, although religion on average ends to be linked to just world beliefs, there are likely to be a lot of nuances.

VanDeursen, M., Pope, A., & Warner, R. (2012). Just world maintenance patterns among intrinsically and extrinsically religious individuals Personality and Individual Differences, 52 (6), 755-758 DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2011.12.028

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

Religion, but not spirituality, helps protect against post-earthquake trauma

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 20:31:00 +0000

On the 6th of April 2009, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck the town of L'Aquila, in central Italy. The result was at least 309 deaths, with more than 1,000 people injured and 66,000 displaced. (After the earthquake, 6 scientists were put on trial for failing to predict it).

Some time after the earthquake, Paolo Stratta and colleagues from the Department of Mental Health in L’Aquila, along with colleagues from the University of Pisa and the University of L'Aquila, interviewed 410 people who had experienced the quake and another 491 from nearby districts that were not directly affected by the
event

Overall, those who had experienced the event reported that they had fewer spiritual experiences and beliefs. You can compare that with two other recent studies. Religious beliefs of Norwegian tsunami survivors did not changes in any systematic way (although they were more likely to change), while people bereaved in 9-11 terrorist attacks tended to become less religious. Overall, I would say that people change their beliefs in response to a traumatic event, and in religious countries (USA, Italy), that probably means becoming less religious.

This study also found that people who had directly experienced the earthquake also reported suffering more post-traumatic stress. That's not surprising, but they found something interesting when they divided the respondents according to whether they they said they were religious, spiritual, both or neither.

In general, the difference in stress levels between those who were exposed to the event and those who were not was smaller for religious people than for spiritual people or those who were neither.

This only reached statistical significance on two of the many subscales they looked at - assessing whether people had anxious flashbacks (shown in the graphic), and whether they were affected emotionally (things like dulled emotions, feeling cut off, or changed personality). But overall the effect seems to be robust.

The "Re-experiencing" subscale of the questionnaire they used asked whether, since the event, their subjects had ever:

…had recurrent bad dreams or nightmares about the loss or event, or awakened terrified?
…suddenly gotten bad feelings when you were around certain places, odors, sounds or people?
…felt or acted as if the events were happening again?
…had distressing thoughts, feelings, or images related to the loss or event?
…become more distressed at the time of year when the loss or event occurred?
Did you notice that other people avoided talking about the loss or event because you got so upset?

While the "Arousal" scale asked whether they had:

…have trouble concentrating or paying attention, for example, following the story line of a TV program or book or remembering what you had read?
…feel like you just couldn’t relax or let your guard down?
…startle easily at the sound of sudden noises, or when someone touched you, spoke to you, or approached you unexpectedly?
…feel more irritable, have outbursts of anger or rage, or lose your temper over minor things?
…have more difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep than before or need a light on to go to sleep?

But if you look at the graph, you can see that something more complex is happening. The reason that there is no difference among religious people is not just because between those who experienced the event have fewer ill effects. It's also because those who did not directly experience it have more flashbacks.

It seems that religious people who did not directly experience the event were still affected by it, while those who did experience it were less affected. Perhaps this is because they are plugged into a wider social network, which allows the burden of distressing events to be shared.

Stratta, P., Capanna, C., Riccardi, I., Perugi, G., Toni, C., Dell’Osso, L., & Rossi, A. (2012). Spirituality and Religiosity in the Aftermath of a Natural Catastrophe in Italy Journal of Religion and Health DOI: 10.1007/s10943-012-9591-z

Dell'Osso, L., Shear, M., Carmassi, C., Rucci, P., Maser, J., Frank, E., Endicott, J., Lorettu, L., Altamura, C., Carpiniello, B., Perris, F., Conversano, C., Ciapparelli, A., Carlini, M., Sarno, N., & Cassano, G. (2008). Validity and reliability of the Structured Clinical Interview for the Trauma and Loss Spectrum (SCI-TALS) Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1745-0179-4-2

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

Religious students have fewer interracial friends

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:25:00 +0000

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Freshmen (NLSF), Julie Park, an educationalist at the University of Maryland, has investigated how inter-racial friendships and religious affiliation interact. The NLSF was an annual survey of White, Black, Latino, and Asian American students from 28 selective institutions that ran from 1999 to 2004.

During their fourth year of college, students were asked to “think of the four people at [your college] with whom you have been closest during your college years.” They were also asked to list the race/ethnicity of each of the friends.

What she found was that the most religious students (based on self-reported religiosity, their frequency of religious service attendance, and their religious observance) also had the fewest friends from other races.

What's more, Protestant or Jewish (but not Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist) students also had the fewest mixed-race friendships. That's probably because these are the two major religious groups.

These two effects were independent - so the most mono-cultural people were the most religious Protestants and Jews. This held even after controlling for a bunch of other factors, including the racial diversity of the college, the diversity of their previous school, and the race of the student.

And on top of all this, belonging to a religious club reduced the chances of inter-racial friendship still further! That wasn't the case with other clubs (except explicitly ethnic clubs - and even here the effect was smaller than for religious clubs).

Now, the interesting thing about these three factors - religiosity, religious denomination, and membership of a religious club - is that they weren't highly correlated. That means that they seem to have independent, additive effects. Park concludes that:

While all of these dimensions certainly overlap and are difficult to disentangle, there are likely distinct facets of each one that may contribute to a student being less likely to form close interracial friendships during college ... It appears that there is no single reason why religion appears to lower the probability of interracial friendship during college, but a combination of affiliation, involvement, and specific involvement in religious peer environments lowers the likelihood of close interracial friendship.

Park has a positive message for university administrators. While the linkage between racial division and religion is problematic, it reflects wider society - and so there is an opportunity here for universities to break the cycle:

University educators are in a prime position to challenge students to harness the elements of religion that “unmake” prejudice or students’ hesitation to cross racial/ethnic boundaries. They can partner with those who often have closer contact with students’ religious lives during college—campus ministry staff and local houses of worship—to discuss possible linkages between race and faith during the college years.

When they see racially homogeneous religious student organizations, they can inquire into whether a specific purpose exists in the demographic composition of the group (such as supporting students’ ethnic identity development) or whether the demography is more a byproduct of a group’s hesitation to address race.

Finally, given that many students of different races may share a particular religious faith, they can consider how faith can be used to unite students across racial/ethnic lines instead of divide them. Religion may be the most racially divided arena of life in the U.S., but the university is a rare opportunity to break the cycle of segregation in America.

Park, J. (2012). When race and religion collide: The effect of religion on interracial friendship during college. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 5 (1), 8-21 DOI: 10.1037/a0026960

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

Fear of death is highest among Muslims

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Many people assume that religious people are less anxious about death than the non-religious. After all, the most popular religions (Islam and Christianity) explicitly hold out the promise of eternal rewards for the faithful.

However, it's not quite that simple. After all, traditional versions of these gods are also pretty vengeful, and if you believe in a vengeful god, then you have to face the distinct possibility of some pretty nasty experiences after death. After all, even holy people usually have some guilty secrets.

However, there's very little international data on the relationship between religion and anxiety. A new study by Chris Ellis, along with colleagues at the University of Malaya, have gone some way to filling this hole, and the results are pretty intriguing.

They interviewed nearly 5,000 people (mostly at Universities) in 3 countries: Malaysia, Turkey, and the USA.

The results for Malaysia were striking. There was a clear linear relationship between religiosity and fear of death. There was a similar relationship in Turkey, although less strong (they interviewed far fewer people in Turkey, however).

Even more striking were the results in the USA. Here, there was a curvilinear relationship - death anxiety was highest in those with average religious feelings.

The reason for these differences is probably down to differences in religious beliefs between Muslims and Christians. Muslims had the highest fear of death - the lowest fear of death was seen in the non-religious in America and Christians in Malaysia.

This tallies with an earlier study, which a few years ago reported that Muslims in the UK are more anxious about death than are Christians and people with no religion.

The authors explain their results in terms of a theory called "death apprehension". This says that religion can have varying effects on death anxiety, depending on the actual beliefs held: belief in a demanding and vindictive God and the certainty about the reality of an afterlife can both lead to more anxiety. On the other hand, abiding by religious teachings and believing in divine forgiveness can reduce death anxiety.

Muslims seem to be more likely to believe in a vindictive god, and less likely to believe in a forgiving god. The authors put this down to fundamental differences in Islamic and Christian religions.

That's possible, but I'm also inclined to think that Christianity has reinvented itself over the past 100 years. As social structures have evolved, the idea of god as a punisher has fallen out of fashion - indeed, many modern Christians don't have any meaningful belief in Hell at all.

Whatever the cause of this difference, however, it's likely that this explains the different relationship between religion and death anxiety in these nations.

There's another interesting implication of the findings of this study, and that's the observation that the non-religious have a very low fear of death. Other studies have also shown that the non-religious have a higher suicide rate. Could these two observations be linked?

Ellis, L., Wahab, E., & Ratnasingan, M. (2012). Religiosity and fear of death: a three‐nation comparison Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-21 DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2011.652606

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

Reminders of death make the non-religious more hostile to religion yet more accepting of beliefs

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:21:00 +0000

There's quite a lot of research showing that subtly reminding people of death can make them more religious (here's an example). But what's not clear is why that should be - and in particular whether non-religious people also become more religious.

Jonathan Jong, a new PhD from the University of Otago in New Zealand, has conducted a series of fascinating studies to investigate just this. You can find his thesis here - there's a lot in it, but here's two key studies that will make you think.

In the first study, Jong asked students to write either about what they thought would happen to them when they die (the death condition), or about watching TV (the control condition). Then he asked them a series of questions about religious beliefs (with a Christian slant) - the Spiritual Belief Scale (SBS).

You can see in the figure that religious people have, as you would expect, high levels of belief in the supernatural - and this increases still further in the 'death' condition versus the TV condition.

Non-religious people had lower beliefs to start with, and they got lower still after death reminders. They become stronger in their rejection of religious beliefs.

OK, so far so good. But this is just what people are saying - and what people say and what they think instinctively are not necessarily the same.

So then Jong ran a version of the Implicit Association Test. This is basically a computerised quiz in which you have to classify words into different groups. Some classifications go against your instinctive beliefs - and these classifications will make you stumble a little, and so take you a little bit longer.

So, in this case, the subjects had to classify supernatural (Angel, Devil, God, Heaven, Soul, etc), real (Eagle, Helicopter...), and imaginary (Batmobile, Fairy, Genie, Mermaid, Narnia) entities as either real or imaginary. For the the non-religious, being asked to classify supernatural and real objects together as real, and distinct from imaginary objects, is tough to do. It goes against their instincts, and so they took significantly longer to do it.

However, if they were primed with death thoughts before hand, they found the task easier. In fact, the improvement in speed was pretty much as large as it was for the religious. What this suggests is that the idea that supernatural entities are real is easier to contemplate for everyone - including the non-religious - if they have been thinking about death.

Jong thinks that what we're seeing here is evidence that reflective, conscious thoughts can be decoupled from instinctive, implicit beliefs.

What may be happening is that all of us - religious and non-religious alike - have a kind of innate response to the fear of death that makes us more accommodating to the idea of supernatural beings (at least, those ones that are culturally accepted as possibly real and not complete fantasies).

Countering this, on the other hand, is something called Worldview Defence. This is the well-known phenomenon that when we are reminded about death, we tend to cling onto comforting, reassuring beliefs about the world. We become more positive about our own ethnic group or nation, for example, and more hostile to strangers.

For the religious, this also includes a heightened attachment to religion. For the non-religious, however, the reverse effect seems to occur.

For the non-religious, being reminded of death makes them instinctively more superstitious, but also overtly more hostile to religion!

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

Hosility to migrants in Europe is strongest among the 'culturally Christian'

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 22:07:00 +0000

There are many types of religion. In Europe, most people when asked would call themselves 'Christian', even if they rarely (if ever) go to church, and have only a shaky grasp of the core Christian beliefs (you might have seen the recent survey commissioned by the Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science looking into this very issue).

These people are quite different from the dutiful Christians who go to Church and, you know, believe in god and all that stuff. Earlier this year I wrote about some research by Ingrid Storm, at Manchester University in the UK, who showed that observant Christians in Britain are less likely than 'nominal' Christians to think that immigration is a threat to national identity.

In a second study, she compared four North European nations - Britain, Ireland, The Netherlands and Denmark. Britain is unusual among these nations for the high level of hostility towards immigrants. And while in all nations, non-Christians are the least hostile towards migrants (this group includes the non-religious but also Muslims, Jews etc), the difference between nominal Christians and observant Christians is only obvious in Britain and Ireland.

However, when Storm crunched the stats she found that, even in The Netherlands and Denmark, regular churchgoers were a little less hostile to immigrants than non-churchgoers.

Interestingly in Ireland, but not in Denmark or the Netherlands, those who were hostile to atheists were also less hostile to immigrants.

Overall, the numbers show a complicated picture. Clearly, religious people are more hostile to immigrants in all nations, but this seems to be mediated by beliefs that being Christian is integral to national identity. So, for example, members of the Danish Folk Church are particularly hostile to immigrants.

But it also seems to be mediated by a fear of Muslims. Hostility to Muslims helped to explain the religion-anti-immigration attitudes in Britain, The Netherlands, and Denmark, although that wasn't the case in Ireland. Maybe that's because Ireland has relatively few immigrants, and especially few Muslim immigrants.

So although religious people in these countries tend to be hostile to immigrants, it doesn't seem to have much to do with their religious beliefs, as such. Rather, it's because religion is used as a tool to separate 'us' from 'them'.

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

Are religious Americans more careful with money?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:20:00 +0000

Dan Hess, at Seattle Pacific University, has looked at whether US cities with more religious people also tend to have fewer people getting into debt trouble.

He analysed data from 120 "Metropolitan Statistical Areas" - places with an average population of 1.7 million. You can see a least of the top 10 most religious, and top 10 least religious, in the box.

Overall, more religious metropolitan areas also had better credit scores, fewer foreclosures (by around two-thirds) and fewer bankruptcies (by around 50%).

These were all significant even after adjusting for other local factors, such as the total population of the area, average income, education, age, and the proportion of ethnic minorities. Hess even adjusted for the percentage of Republican voters in the area.

Hess puts this down to a direct and indirect effects.

Firstly , he proposes a direct effect, saying that:

Christian and Islamic scriptures espouse prudence and speak against carrying debt. For example, “The wicked borrows but does not pay back, but the righteous is generous and gives” (Psalms 37:21); “Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed. Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:7, 8). The Quran states, “If the debtor is in distress, then let there be postponement until he is in ease” (2:280).

Secondly, he says, religion is specifically sought out by "risk-averse individuals who are trying to reduce the anxiety about risk and uncertainty in their lives". As a result, they are naturally less likely to take financial gambles.

Now, both of these could plausibly influence attitudes to financial risk. However, I can't see how the second would have any affect on the average debt levels in a county. Assuming, that is, that there are the same proportion of risk averse people in each area.

Which brings me to another point. Eyeballing that list, it seems to me that the two groups of cities have some pretty major cultural differences - of which religion is a part, but surely not the whole story. It strikes me that the least religious metropoli are well, more cosmopolitan.

By that I mean that they are more culturally diverse and culturally dynamic. They are the sorts of places that might attract risk takers. They also seem to be the sort of places to attract people for whom external show and image are important (extrinsics, in the jargon).

However, my knowledge of American geo-culture is not so hot, despite years of avid telly watching. So I can't really put my finger on what it is - but those cities are just very different!

Dan W. Hess (2012). The Impact of Religiosity on Personal Financial Decisions Journal of Religion & Society, 14 (Link)

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

Are religious identity and national identity interchangeable?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 21:21:00 +0000

source

Kenneth Harttgen (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Matthias Opfinger (Leibniz University Hannover) have developed an index of National Identity based on survey responses to eight questions. Things like interest in politics, confidence in the parliament and justice system, and interest in politics - as well as more obvious things like willingness to fight for your country, and national pride.

Using this index, they set out to discover which factors were most closely linked to a high level of national identity (here's their Working Paper).

Some factors are interesting, but fairly readily understood. High levels of democracy promote national identity (not surprising, given the definition), as do good roads and lots of phones (this is independent of wealth, and is probably to do with the ease that communication within a country). More populous countries also have a higher national identity.

But they also found that religious diversity was linked to increased national identity. On the other hand, religious polarisation (when a country is split into 2 or three large religions) was not.

Now, the really interesting thing was that the strongest link was not between current diversity and national identity, but between religious diversity in 1900 and current national identity. This is evidence that high levels of religious diversity in the past actually seem to strengthen national identity now (or, alternatively, given the number of new countries over the past 100 years, that only a really strong national identity can forge a new nation in the face of religious diversity!).

What Harttgen and Opfinger propose is that religious identity and national identity are flip sides of the same coin. When you have a country with mostly a single religion, people define themselves in terms of a shared religion. But in countries where your neighbours are likely to be of a different religion, religious identity becomes less important, and so people begin to identify themselves in terms of their shared nationality.

However, another interesting finding was that there was no link (positive or negative) between ethnic diversity and national identity. Their explanation for this doesn't make sense to me:

Two simple examples can make this more easily understandable. First, take two persons of the same nationality, say German. These persons will identify with their religious group as long as they adhere to the same denomination. They share a common set of values, which is based on their religious beliefs. Two persons of the same nationality might not be able to identify with their religion if they adhere to two different denominations, say Protestant and Catholic. Hence, higher religious diversity decreases the importance of religion. But still these people share a broader set of values or cultural beliefs which are based on their national heritage and lets them form a national identity. As a consequence, higher religious diversity, which leads to less importance of religion, increases national identity.

As a second example, consider two US American citizens where one is Caucasian and the other is African American. No matter what their religion is these persons can at least identify on a national level. They share a common set of values which is based on being a US national. This example can help understand why ethnic differences might not affect the formation of a national identity.

Just swap 'ethnicity' for religion in the above and you'll see what I mean. It makes just as much sense (or as little, depending on your perspective). Nevertheless, it does seem to be the case ethnic diversity does not affect national identity (since other studies have found something similar), whereas religious identity does.

It's also hard to reconcile these findings with previous research that found that religious fervour and national identity were closely linked in countries with a low religious diversity.

I suspect that the somewhat odd definition of 'national identity' used in this study is skewing the results!

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

Church and freedom from depression: cause or effect?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:23:00 +0000

That churchgoers in the USA are less likely to be depressed than non-Churchgoers is pretty well established now. However, what's always been unclear is whether this is down to cause or effect.

Does going to Church reduce your risk for depression? Perhaps the social interaction help to prevent it, or perhaps the spiritual beliefs are a buttress against depression.

Or is it simply that depressed people tend to stay indoors and become reclusive?

One way to find out is to follow people over time. See whether depression precedes a loss of religion, or vice versa.

One recent study followed 114 30-year olds living in New Haven Connecticut. When questioned 10 years after the initial interviews, they found that among the 72 individuals whose parents had suffered depression, those who had said that religion or spirituality were very important to them were the least likely to have become depressed.

But, strangely, there was no effect of churchgoing. What's more, there was no effect in those individuals whose parents did not suffer depression.

The second study was much larger. They followed 2,000 people in Rhode Island for nearly 20 years. Joanna Maselko, the lead author on the second study, has done some previous research on this topic (I covered one study back in 2008 (Being closer to god linked to more depression).

What they found that, for women at least, those who had been depressed before age 18 were much more likely to stop going to church when they were older.

In fact, after adjusting for other factors, these women were 40% more likely to stop attending religious services. For men, however, there was no effect.

So, why did these two studies come up with such different findings?

Well, the first study was pretty small, and you should always be sceptical of small studies. But there were some key differences in the way they approached the problem.

The first study looked at older people (aged 30), while the second looked at younger people (aged under 18).

The first study sought out people whose parents were depressed, while the second study looked at a more random selection of people.

But probably most importantly, the first study looked at beliefs, while the second study looked at behaviour.

Could it be that spiritual beliefs help to defend against depression, but not churchgoing or socialising? Unfortunately the second study didn't examine beliefs. And, frustratingly, neither of them looked at the reverse of their original hypothesis (i.e. whether depression was linked to future spirituality in the firs one, or whether religious people are less likely to become depressed in the second).

So these studies join what is a very patchy picture overall. There does seem to be some link between religion and depression. But what that link is, I can't say!

Miller, L., Wickramaratne, P., Gameroff, M., Sage, M., Tenke, C., & Weissman, M. (2011). Religiosity and Major Depression in Adults at High Risk: A Ten-Year Prospective Study American Journal of Psychiatry DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2011.10121823

Maselko, J., Hayward, R., Hanlon, A., Buka, S., & Meador, K. (2012). Religious Service Attendance and Major Depression: A Case of Reverse Causality? American Journal of Epidemiology DOI: 10.1093/aje/kwr349

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

Can a pill take away the desire for religion?

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:15:00 +0000

Well yes it can - in a manner of speaking.

Today's study is one that was actually published in 2010, and has been languishing in my files. I just rediscovered it!

It's one of a trio from Aaron Kay and colleagues, at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. They've published a few studies before on how the need to feel in control of situations can drive a heightened sense of religiosity (e.g. here, here, here and here).

This study took an unusual approach. First they gave their subjects (37 undergraduates) a 'herbal. pill. They told them that they were going to take part in an experiment to learn the effects of this pill on colour perception. Of course, the pill was just a placebo and the experiment had nothing to do with colour perception.

And then they hold half their subjects that the pill had an unfortunate side effect - it would cause some "mild arousal or anxiety".

Next they put their subjects through some pen and paper exercises (while they waited for the pill to 'metabolize'). Half the subjects were given a word game that implanted in their mind ideas related to randomness, by featuring words like "chance" and "random". The other half got negativity words - stuff like "poorly" and slimy".

Now, the idea of this is that priming thoughts of randomness should heighten the subjects' religiosity. And so it did.

As you can see in the graphic, if they weren't told that the pill caused anxiety, then priming with thoughts of randomness significantly increased belief in a controlling god.

However, if they were told that the pill would make them feel anxious, then the effect disappeared.

What Kay thinks is happening is that the randomness prime makes his subjects feel anxious, and they restore their sense of well being by affirming a belief in a controlling god, thereby dealing with the stress of randomness.

But the subjects who were told the pill caused anxiety had a rationale explanation for the stress they were feeling (or so they thought). Because they could explain it, they didn't need to turn to belief in a controlling god.

So there you go. A pill can reduce religiousness - so long as it's a pill that you think will cause anxiety (but doesn't really)!

Kay, A., Moscovitch, D., & Laurin, K. (2010). Randomness, Attributions of Arousal, and Belief in God Psychological Science, 21 (2), 216-218 DOI: 10.1177/0956797609357750 This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Religion, self esteem and psychological adjustment

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:49:00 +0000

Much is made of the apparent fact that religious people are happier and better adjusted than the non-religious. However, as regular readers of this blog will know, this is to a large extent an illusion.

The problem is that most research is done in the USA, where being religious is the cultural norm. If you look further afield, you'll find that religion is only linked to happiness in countries where a lot of people are religious.

Well, here's some more on that theme. It's from Jochen Gebauer (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Constantine Sedikides (University of Southampton, UK) - who've featured here before in a couple of previous posts. This time, they've used data from the dating site e-darling - nearly 190,000 people from 11 European countries.

The beauty about these dating sites is that they ask people to fill in a lot of information about themselves.

So, for example, they were able to put together an estimate of each individual's psychological adjustment, based on the self-ratings of the degree to which they were adaptable, cheerful, optimistic, or resilient (and other similar factors). They also estimated social self-esteem, based on ratings of things like how skilled the individual perceived themselves to be in social situations, and making new friends.

They threw all these data into a multi-level model, which allows you to tease out the interrelationship of environment (i.e. national characteristics) with personal characteristics.

Take a look at the graph. Each data point in light grey represents a single country. The x-axis is the average religion in a country. The y-axis is the correlation between religion and psychological adjustment (or self-esteem) in that country.

So, on the far right, we have Turkey (represented by the letter T!). It's all the way over there because it has the highest average religion.

And Turkey also has the highest correlation between personal religion and psychological adjustment (and social self esteem).

Sweden, on the other hand, is on the far left, with the lowest average religiosity. It also has the lowest correlation between person religion and psychological adjustment.

In fact, there's a clear, statistically significant trend - the higher the average strength of religion in a country, the higher the correlation between personal religion and psychological adjustment or social self esteem.

Now, that's all very interesting and adds some more flesh to the picture which is revealed by other studies. But here's what I find particularly interesting about this graphic.

Even in the least religious countries, where even moderately religious people are in a minority, the correlation is not negative.

In other words, although non-religious people feel uncomfortable in religious countries, religious people have no problems living in non-religious countries.

And that's got to be good news for secularists (and religious people).

Gebauer, J., Sedikides, C., & Neberich, W. (2012). Religiosity, Social Self-Esteem, and Psychological Adjustment: On the Cross-Cultural Specificity of the Psychological Benefits of Religiosity Psychological Science, 23 (2), 158-160 DOI: 10.1177/0956797611427045

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

Three puzzles of non-religion in Britain

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 20:50:00 +0000

Britain, like many countries in the West, has been undergoing a decline in the numbers of religious believers. The patterns of change, however, throw up some curious anomalies. Three of these puzzles have recently been investigated by David Voas, a demographer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex - all quite different, each of them quirky, and all of them shedding a little fascinating insight into the trends and patterns of non-belief in the UK.

First off, why are baby girls more likely to be religious than baby boys? If that question at first sounds nonsensical, it's because the UK census asks parents to state the religious affiliation of their children. The result is a small sex difference - one or two extra girls out of every hundred are labelled as being 'Christian' compared with boys.

The reason, Voas found, is probably because dads are less likely to be religious than mums. The child is given the religious affiliation that matches their same-sex parent. And so the gender gap is the biggest for families with a non-religious dad and a religious mum.

For the second puzzle, just take a look at this graph. It shows the change in religious affiliation since 1915 among graduates and non-graduates.

Affiliation has declined in both groups, but it's been much faster among the non-graduates. As a result, although non-graduates were more religious than graduates at the start of the last century, now they are actually less religious!

It seems that this is probably because graduates are much more passionate about their beliefs - either religious or non-religious. Non-graduates are more likely to be in the fuzzy middle - nominally religious but not really devout.

Now, both nominal and devout religious will put themselves down on the census as 'Christian'. However, as society as a whole becomes less religious, those who were formally nominally religious will now be completely non-religious. Those who once would have been strongly religious (many of whom are graduates) will now more likely be nominally religious - but still list themselves as Christian.

In other words, this is another artefact of the crude measure of religion used in the UK census. Because it only records broad affiliation, it misses the subtleties.

The last puzzle surrounds the patchiness of religious affiliation in Britain. If you look at a very fine level (at the level of individual local council wards), the percentage of people saying that they don't identify with a religion ranges from 1.9% all the way up to a most godless 42.4% (this godless epicentre is actually a place in Brighton, just down the road from where I live).

Voas found that this variation can only partly be explained by factors such as average age and professional status. An additional major factor was the number of religious people in neighbouring wards.

So it seems that religion and non-religion tends to aggregate into clusters, although what causes this aggregation is hard to say, but Voas suspects that factors like social history and local economic factors probably play a large role.

On top of this, some areas have a strong local culture. Brighton, for example, has a long tradition as venue for a bit of escapism from the moral straitjacket of London soceity - as a result, the place is now full of counter-cultural Bohemians of all types! (And me...)

Voas, D., & McAndrew, S. (2012). Three Puzzles of Non-religion in Britain Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27 (1), 29-48 DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2012.642725

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

The handedness of belief

noreply@blogger.com (Tomas Rees) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:39:00 +0000

People who are ambidextrous are more likely to have magical beliefs. That's something that was known before but has recently been confirmed by Gjurgjica Badzakova-Trajkov and team from Auckland University, New Zealand.

The figure on the right shows how high their subjects scored on a 'magical ideation' scale, which asks questions such as "Some people can make me aware of them just by thinking about me" and "I think I could learn to read other’s minds if I wanted to".

Handedness was assessed just by asking their hand preferences for a variety of tasks, like throwing or using scissors. As you can see, those people without a strong hand preference were also the most likely to have magical ideas.

So you might think that ambidextrous people are more likely to be religious? Well hold on.

A few years ago Christopher Niebauer, at Slippery Rock University in the USA, showed that ambidextrous people are more likely to believe evolution (in the USA at least). [That paper was sent to me last year, but I can't remember who sent it. If it was you - well thanks!]

The explanation seems to be that mixed-handed people are more open minded and more creative. So they are more likely to shake often creationist dogma, but also more likely to take other 'heretical' thoughts seriously. Incidentally, in a later paper Niebauer also showed that ambidextrous people are more gullible!

Why should this be? Well, one theory is that the brains of ambidextrous people are wired up differently. Not only are their hands less one sided, but their brains also may be more even across the two hemispheres - less 'lateralized'.

And that's where Badzakova-Trajkov's research comes in. She showed that the brains of people who think magically were just as lateralized as the brains of more rational thinkers. What's more, when she measured handedness by a proper test - rather than just asking people about their preferences - the relationship with magical thinking disappeared.

She concludes from this that the connection between ambidexterity and magical thinking is behavioural, not neuropsychological. What's probably happening is simply that those people who are open to magical thinking, and who are willing to take on-board radical ideas such as evolution, are also more open to the idea of using their non-dominant hand to do normal daily tasks.

These people are just iconoclasts by nature!

Badzakova-Trajkov, G., Häberling, I., & Corballis, M. (2011). Magical ideation, creativity, handedness, and cerebral asymmetries: A combined behavioural and fMRI study Neuropsychologia, 49 (10), 2896-2903 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.06.016

Lee Niebauer, C., Christman, S., Reid, S., & Garvey, K. (2004). Interhemispheric interaction and beliefs on our origin: Degree of handedness predicts beliefs in creationism versus evolution Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 9 (4), 433-447 DOI: 10.1080/13576500342000266

Christman, S., Henning, B., Geers, A., Propper, R., & Niebauer, C. (2008). Mixed-handed persons are more easily persuaded and are more gullible: Interhemispheric interaction and belief updating Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, 13 (5), 403-426 DOI: 10.1080/13576500802079646

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