Epiphenom

Atonement, self-punishment, and guilt

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:15:00 +0000

Atonement is a funny concept. Essentially, it's the idea that you can cancel out a wrongdoing not by doing a good deed, but by engaging in some act of self-punishment.

Although the classic example comes from Christianity (the tortured death of Jesus) similar concepts of penance are widespread in other religions. Penance goes beyond the more normal concepts of justice (revenge and punishment) because it's voluntary.

Perhaps there's more going on here than meets the eye. Rob Nelissen and Marcel Zeelenberg at Tilburg University in The Netherlands speculate that people might indulge in self-punishment because it makes them feel better.

They set out to test whether people self-punish when they are made to feel guilty, but only if they can't make good the wrong doing directly.

The basic idea was that subjects had to perform a test that they were told was a measure of how hard they concentrated. As usual it was no such thing - whether the subjects succeeded or failed was entirely manipulated by the investigators (why do the subjects fall for this every time, I wonder!).

They were paired up in this game with another player (OK, so the player was fictitious too, just there to help manipulate their guilt).

Basically the deal was that some of the subjects were made to feel that they had underperformed on the second round of the game, so that they had let the other player down.

In the third round, they were given the opportunity to self punish. Instead of just receiving points for correct answers (as in the previous rounds), now they would get points taken away for wrong ones.

The key to the experiment was that some participants chose the level of their own punishment, while others got to chose the level of their partner's punishment.

The graph sums up the results nicely. In the control condition, there was no guilt and the level of self-punishment and partner punishment were similarly low.

In the guilty condition, there was no change in the partner punishment. But there was a large increase in self-punishment.

It seems likely that this self punishment only takes place when there is no opportunity to right the wrong. In another experiment, they asked people to envisage a variety of scenarios about borrowing money for college from their parents, and then goofing off. They were then given some options on what to do next.

Some students were presented with the scenario where they had no opportunity to make up for their wrongdoing by working harder. These students were more likely to choose the self-punishment course (denying themselves the pleasure of a skiing trip).

So, there you go. Do the religious ideas of penance and atonement result from a subliminal need to self-punish? And, if they do, what could possibly be the function of it (from a biological/evolutionary perspective)?

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Nelissen RM, & Zeelenberg M (2009). When guilt evokes self-punishment: evidence for the existence of a Dobby Effect. Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 9 (1), 118-22 PMID: 19186924

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

A brief history of 2009

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:15:00 +0000

Happy (Gregorian) New Year everyone! Let's kick off with a traditional round-up - 2009 was a great year for new research into belief and non-belief, and here's some of the highlights!

First up, brain scans. Neuroimaging studies are starting to get under the skin of religious beliefs, and several this year showed the religious beliefs seem to tap into the neural pathways used for everyday life. For example, one showed that praying to God is much the same as interacting with another human.

We also learned that God wants the same thing as you happen to want, and also that people seem to create god in their own image. Sam Harris and colleagues showed that religious brains work in a pretty similar way to non-religious brains.

What are the effects of religion? Well, research this year showed that religion acts like an antidepressant, reducing anxiety over mistakes. We got some insights into the link between religion and homophobia, and found that religious prompts make people more obedient.

Spiritual guidance doesn't reduce substance abuse. Praying can reduce your own anxiety, but praying for sick people doesn't have any effect.

There were a raft of studies showing that, contrary to expectations, religious beliefs don't seem to have much effect on behaviour. Rather, the important factor seems to be the social side - attending religious meetings, for example.

Religious attendance, but not beliefs, were linked to a improved health, a reduction in suicides, and increased marital fidelity. Christians behave better, but only on Sundays.

On the down side, religious services - but not religious beliefs - also increase hostility towards people outside your group. And Church goers are more likely to steal newspapers.

So much for the effects of religion, are we any closer to understanding why religion is still so popular? I think so. In 2009, we learned that God is the ultimate attachment figure, and that people get more religious when they feel events are out of their control (although not if you first make them feel good about themselves). What's more, God is someone to blame when disaster strikes.

The highlight for me was my own paper. This added to the growing body of evidence that social conditions - particularly ones that increase feelings of insecurity - are a major reason why people turn to religion. A paper from Greg Paul also showed a link between religion and societal ill health. The Global Peace Index for 2009 was published, and the countries with the most atheists also scored the best.

And why do people become atheists? The reason young adults are less religious than children and older adults might be to do with cognitive abilities. The correlation between atheism and IQ was discussed in at least one controversial paper. Education increases church attendance, but decreases religious beliefs, and simply reading a couple of paragraphs by Dawkins can make you less religious.

So as society becomes more secure, you might expect more people to lose their religion. Sure enough, the ARIS survey in the USA and the British Social Attitudes Survey both showed religion is continuing to decline.

How will society look with more atheists? Well, one of the first studies to look at atheists (rather than the non-religious) finds that they are a happy bunch after all! Perhaps this is because, although transcendental spirituality did not increase happiness in children, 'personal' and 'communal' spirituality does. What's more, atheists also experience a sense of awe and wonder.

Atheist parents are more likely to tolerate divergent opinions from their children. In the US, atheists are notoriously the least trusted minority. But new research shows that this is probably simply because they are 'unknown outsiders', and that this fear can be reduced simply by atheists being open. In fact, the least religious societies are also the ones with the highest levels of trust.

And finally, we all know that university academics are a pretty irreligious bunch, but which discipline has the most godless? That prize goes, perhaps unsurprisingly, to the psychologists! (Although new research that came out in December suggests that philosophers probably trump the lot!)

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

Religious rituals explained by how we memorise?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:20:00 +0000

There's a nice article over at New Scientist on the theories of Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford. He's been looking at religious rituals, and thinks he can explain why dramatic rituals tend to occur only in small, fringe religions - and why religious rituals are so undramatic in the complex, hierarchical religions that dominate most of the world (Christianity, Islam, etc).

His idea is that the different types of rituals appeal to different fundamental aspects of memory:

"The reason why there are only two types of religion is that there are only two basic systems of memory that matter," he argues. The first is semantic memory, which deals with things we are conscious of remembering and stores what we have learned about the world. Then there is episodic memory, which hangs onto memorable events from our own lives. Whitehouse argues that to persist and spread, a religion must elicit the help of rituals that reinforce memories in both these systems.

So, religions that have little in the way of systematic theology, and instead depend on intense personal experiences, often also feature intense rituals that are stored in episodic memory.

Complex religions that require adherents to memorize shared stories (often counter-intuitive ones) instead feature frequent, low-intensity rituals designed to trigger semantic memories.

It's a nice idea. It's also one that provides an alternative to the more common idea that rituals are 'costly signals' - i.e. by participating, you show that you are sufficiently committed to the group to spend time doing apparently pointless tasks.

But is it true? A good theory makes predictions that you wouldn't otherwise expect. Unfortunately, I don't think the predictions made by Whitehouse's theory fit the bill:

One advantage is that it makes testable predictions. For example, religious rituals are unlikely to be both low frequency and low arousal - because such rituals would not be easily remembered - or high frequency, high arousal - because most people will not willingly undergo too much torment even in the name of religion. It also predicts that doctrinal religions will tend not to have low-frequency, high-arousal rituals because they undermine orthodoxy, and imagistic religions will tend not to have high-frequency, low-arousal rituals because these undermine exclusivity.

To me, it is not surprising that high-arousal rituals are also low-frequency. You could not do penis-cutting every day.

It seems to me that the intensity of frequency of religious rituals are more likely driven by the nature of the society, rather than the type of religion. These imagistic religions occur in small-scale, tribal societies.

What's more, there are plenty of examples of low-frequency, intense rituals within doctrinal religions. Pilgrimages, for example. Not to mention things like Shia self-flagellation and Christian sacramental penance. Of course, Whitehouse is an expert anthropologist so no doubt is aware of these. His argument is that the bulk of religions fit these 'ideals'.

But one interesting deviation is modern Christianity. In the UK at least, many Christians go to church once a year at Christmas time - the very model of a 'low frequency, low arousal' ritual!

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

Christian cancellation of the secular truce

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 21:22:00 +0000

People living in the UK will have noticed that Christians have been getting noisier in recent years. More clamour for more state-funded faith schools, more litigations, and more complaints against perceived anti-Christian bias.

Evidence of a popular religious revival? Or the death throes of a once-powerful ideology? A team from Erasmus University in the Netherlands has some answers.

It seems that when Christianity is popular, Christians are content with the idea of a firewall separating Church and State. It's only when Christianity begins to lose it's influence over the population at large that Christians begin to campaign for the State to adopt a Christian character.

Looking at survey data from 18 Western countries, they found:

The fewer Christians in a country, the greater the support among Christians for a greater public role for religion (as shown in the graph).
The polarization of views between Christians and non-religious on a public role for religion is greatest in countries where there are fewest Christians.

Then they took a look at data from the Netherlands, where the proportion of Christians has plummeted from 60% in 1970 to 35% in 1996. There's a good time-series of data covering this decline in Christianity.

In the Netherlands they found a similar picture. As the numbers of Christians declined, the support among Christians for a greater public role for religion went up, and the gulf in attitudes grew.

I guess these results are not too surprisingly, but they do highlight a reality that is often not fully appreciated by researchers into 'secularization'. And that is that secularization is not a single thing or process. What's more, it's possible to have different aspects of secular (or religious) trends to move in opposite directions, at least for a time.

A resurgence of governmental interest in religion, and increased noise from religious adherents, can happen alongside a increasing popular disinterest!

Well, that's nearly it for 2009! I hope you enjoyed the blog this year, and I wish you all a great Christmas (or whatever you choose to call the midwinter/summer festival). I'll try to put a post up before the New Year, but just in case I don't - have a happy New Year as well :)

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Achterberg, P., Houtman, D., Aupers, S., Koster, W., Mascini, P., & Waal, J. (2009). A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing Religious Deprivatization in the West Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 48 (4), 687-701 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01473.x

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

Religion continues to decline in the UK

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:25:00 +0000

Quick post tonight, with news from the British Social Attitudes Survey. The 26th report is due out in January, but they've slipped out a yuletide press release on religion.

The press release points out that religious belief has dropped sharply, and that Britain is much less religious than the USA. No surprises there! You can a quick heads up from Irish Sun. The NSS has some interesting figures on differences in social attitudes (homosexuality, euthanasia, etc).

But in this post I wanted to pull out some interesting facts in the survey not reported in the press release (you can browse the full report at the publishers website).

First off, some interesting data on the 'fuzzy' middle ground. Everyone always talks about the religious and the non-religious, but David Voas (who wrote the report and who also was a presenter at the NSRN conference last week) points out that many people don't fit into either category.

The idea is that religious people are those who believe, identify with a religion, and go to services at least occasionally. The non-religious are people who don't believe and never attend. And the 'fuzzy' group is everyone else (they either identify, believe, or occasionally attend - but not all three). Here's the data for the UK and USA:

The 'fuzzy middle' is quite large in the USA. The main difference versus the UK is decline of religious at the expense of the non-religious. Presumably what's happening here is that the 'fuzzy' middle is a group that people transition through on their way to being non-religious.

Some other data from the report:

I find the last line really amazing! Here's just one more, to show how the decline of religion is spread among denominations:

Lastly, it turns out that although the level of belief is very different in the USA and UK, attitudes to religion seem to be pretty similar in the two countries:

The majority of people in both countries are keen to maintain a separation of religion and state. For example two thirds (67% in Britain and 66% in the US) think religious leaders should not try to influence government decision-making.
Nearly three quarters (73%) of people in Britain and two thirds (66%) of Americans think people with strong religious beliefs are often too intolerant of others.

Now, that's a surprising result, given the findings of another recent study - but that will have to wait till the next blog post!

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

Atheism increases trust

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:01:00 +0000

In modern, industrialised societies, we put an awful lot of trust in strangers. That's good, because if we couldn't trust strangers then most of our economic and social transactions would struggle. In fact, trust is a cornerstone of economic growth.

It's hardly surprising, then, that nations with high levels of trust are also the wealthiest. They also often have a high number of atheists - Sweden is the classic example.

But does atheism add to that trust, or take away from it? After all, atheists are (famously) one of the least trusted minorities in the USA.

Two Swedish researchers (Niclas Berggren and Christian Bjørnskov of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm) have looked at what role religion has in explaining different levels of trust in countries around the world, and in different States of the USA (Working paper only, available here).

The first thing they show is that non-religion and trust are correlated. In countries with more religious people, and in states with more religious people, fewer people are will to answer "yes" to the question "In general, do you think most people can be trusted or can't you be too careful?"

Well, that's interesting in itself, but of course there could be any number of reasons for that correlation. For example, income inequality erodes trust, and it also increases religiosity. Berggren and Bjørnskov take care of most of them by adding them into their model.

However, even after adjusting for income inequality, presence of a monarchy (increases trust, apparently), post-communism, and proportion of Muslims, Catholics or eastern religious people (none of the religions had any effect), the correlation remains pretty robust.

Just in case there's something magic about Nordic countries, they even included them as an 'explanatory factor' (it turns out that there does indeed seem to be something special about them - it's not just the atheism)

For the US states, they adjusted again for income inequality, blacks, and ages. They also took into account from which countries the local's ancestors had emigrated. Again, the correlation stuck.

To give you a feel for how strong the effect is, if you go from the average nation religiosity (67% of people saying that religion is important in their lives) to Nordic levels (20%), the number of trusting people goes up by about 8-10 percentage points (and this is after adjusting for all the factors mentioned above).

Among US states, the effect is similar. If you move from the average (65%) to the least religious (Vermont, 42%), then trust increases by about 5-10 percentage points.

How did they demonstrate causality?

What they've shown is a correlation, of course. So how can they be confident that it's atheism increasing trust, rather than trust increasing atheism? Well, they use a statistical trick (guess I have to be careful with that word, given the climate email controversy!) call 'instrumented variables'. Basically, this means choosing another variable that correlates with religion but can't directly be influenced by trust.

They chose GDP which might seems strange choice given that trust is an important cause of economic growth. However, they show that the other factors included in the model account for this relationship, and that GDP is independent of reverse causality.

How could more religion mean less trust?

It seems strange, given that religion is supposed to increase honest behaviour, that people in less religious countries have more trust in their neighbours. Berggren and Bjørnskov argue that this is probably because of the divisive effect that religion can have:

The main reason to expect a negative effect, of the kind we have identified, is that religions may cause division and rift, both in that religious people may distrust those who do not share their beliefs and who are not subject to the same enforcement mechanisms as they are, and in that nonreligious people may regard with suspicion those who take religiosity seriously.

In other words, one explanation for these results might that religion promotes distrust of people outside the group. It sounds intuitively plausible, and it's an idea that's supported by other the research into the causes of distrust.

While you might expect that people distrust anyone who's different from them, it turns out that that is not the case. Diversity only increases distrust when the different groups are segregated from each other. This is from a talk by Eric Uslaner, at the University of Maryland:

... diversity can also drive people apart–when people feel threatened by minority groups. Most critically, diversity can drive down trust when there is little opportunity for contact between groups groups–as where the minority group is geographically segregated from the majority.

However, Uslaner also points out that religious diversity does not itself seem to greatly increase distrust. It's the strength of religious feeling that's critically important:

Religious fractionalization is only weakly related to ethnic and linguistic diversity. Religious fundamentalists are significantly less trusting than adherents of mainstream religions (Uslaner, 2002, ch. 4) and religious conflict is at the heart of many inter-state and intra-state wars. So we might expect that religious diversity would be more strongly (negatively) related to generalized trust–but again, we see only a weak relationship.

Now, the interesting thing about religious diversity is that it actually decreases the level of religious fervour. If religious fervour is critical to distrust, that would help explain the unexpectedly weak relationship between religious diversity and trust.

Well, so much for the philosophizing. What we need now is for someone to tease out these two factors to see which explains the link between atheism and trust.

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

Live blogging the NSRN

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:45:00 +0000

Today I'm in Wolfson College, Oxford, for the first conference of the Non-religious and Secular Research Network. Now the plan is that I'm going to live blog this - i.e. I'll keep returning to this page to post updates through the day. hmm, let's see how that goes, shall we!

The first presentation will be by David Voas, a demgrapher at the University of Manchesster: "Who are the non-religious in Britain and where do they come from?" The room's filling up - looks like there'll be around 50 participants.

11:30
So, who are the non_religious in the UK. Here's the topline:

Ethnicity: In the last census, over half of people with Chinese ethnicity sad they had no religious affiiliation. For whites and Afro-Carribean descent, that drops to 10-15%. But there are virtually none among those of Bangladeshi or Pakistani descent.

Age: religion declines from over 80% in people born in 1910, to 40% of people born in 1980.

Gender: women are mmore religious, and this gap is stable with age. There's interesting evidence thaht this is due to social pressure. It seems that the drop in religion lags men by 10 years. what's more, the gap also appears in newborns (girl babies are more likely to be labelled religious than boy babies).

Jedi knights. around 3% of young men, and around 1% of young women classified theselves as jedi kniht.

Education: Although historically educated people are less religious, this appears to be switching for youn adults today.

Marriage: non religious women are more likely to be alone. Same for young men, though not older men. This could be cultural (acceptability of living alone).

Non religious are less authoritarian (although this gap is smaller in younger people) and less political. They are more hedonistic but less happy.

And the most religious regions in England and Wales: Norwich, Cambridge, Rhonda Valley and, at the very top, my home town Brighton!

12:30
Kirsten Barnes, a PhD student at Cambridge, presented her research into "hyperactive agency detection". This involved showing a small group of atheists and Christians images of random noise, and asking if they see any patterns (faces in the clouds).

Turns out there was no differences between the groups. This is surprising, because this sort of agency detection is supposed to be a trigger for religion. Turns out that there were several difference between he two groups. The atheists were younger, more paranoid, more psychotic, and more neurotic. Strangely, however, there was no correlation between paranoid ideation and seeing images. Perhaps the groups were too small.

13:30
Interesting presentation from Miguel Farias, a psychologist at Oxford. He's found that, when relating life stories, atheists are more likely to report personal relationships as the most important events in their lives. They have more perceived control over their lives, and generally a more hedonistic attitude. Interestingly, they are also more likely to believe that the fantasies described in the da Vinci code are true!

15:00
Ryan Cragun, over from Florida, is presenting on predjudice in the USA. First some demogra,hics. The nonreligious are not different from religious on education or marital status (after adjusting for age). They do tend to earn slightly more though.

He's looked at whether people who are self-declared atheists, rather than non-religious. It turns out that atheists face twice the level of discrimination as the non-religious. This is particularly acute in the social setting. Cragun thinks this because they are "out and proud" - i.e. identify as members of a minority and proud of it. Others have shown that these are the people who face greatest predjudice (because they are perceived by the majority as a threat).

In questions, it's been suggested that the people who state their religion as "atheist" may be more combative.

15:30

John Lanman has presented a theory that links the cognitive science to societal level differences in religiosity. The key ingredient is that threat drives people to increase their religious actions (devotions, attendence). The other ingedient is what's called "credibility enhancing displays". This is the idea that in order to believe what people tell us we need to see them act according to their beliefs - they need to walk the talk.

In low religious countries, such as Sweden, what happened was that threat was reduced (limited ethnic diversiy and high social welfare). People didn't stop believing, but they did stop acting on their beliefs. As a result, their children didn't really believe them when they talked about god. Hence religion did not get passed on.

19:50

Well that's it, all over now and I'm on the train home. The last presentation was by Colin Campbell, the doyen of sociological studies of the non-religious. He's incensed by the theory put forward by Miller and Stark that claims men are less religious then women because they have different attitude to risk - specifically because they're less able then mwomen to 'delay gratification' (i.e. undergo hardship now for rewards in the future).

This theory is flawed in all sorts of ways, most of which I covered in a series of blog posts earlier this year. Campbell seized upon the fact that this is basically a dressed up version of Pascal's Wager. On top of that, most religious people in the West don't even believe in Hell. In which case what, exactly is it that non-believers are at risk of?

I hope that's given a flavour at least of this rather remarkable conference. There's been some fascinating stuff presented, most of which I haven't been able to cover. Now at least I can put some faces to some of the names on the papers I've been reading!

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

Off to the NSRN conference in Oxford

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:45:00 +0000

This Friday sees the launch conference of the Non-religion and Secularity Research Network. I'll be toddling off there tomorrow evening, and I'm going to try live-blogging the event via my Nokia N97. So stay tuned on Friday!

Here's the keynote lectures, to give you a flavour:

Is it risky to be an unbeliever? Gender, risk and religiosity: A critique
Colin Campbell (University of York)

On the receiving end: Discrimination toward the non-religious in the U.S.
Ryan Cragun (University of Tampa)

Who are the non-religious in Britain and where do they come from?
David Voas (University of Manchester)

And you can take a look at the full programme here. There's a really marvellous faculty and range of presentations. I'm really looking forward to it!

Anyway, if anyone has any burning questions they'd like fired at any of the speakers, let me know via the comments now or on the day, and I'll see if I can punt them.

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

What you want, god wants

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:08:00 +0000

Religious people tend to think that they know what their god wants, but how do they come by that knowledge? For me, as an atheist, it's a fascinating question. The gods can't be communicating their preferences directly (because there's no such thing), so where do these beliefs come from?

One obvious source is the various holy books. However, even if you restrict yourself to adherents of a single religion, there are vast differences in beliefs about god's opinions (and that's just looking around the world today - when you extend the comparisons back in time the disagreements between believers become even more dramatic).

All this suggests that people must be projecting their own beliefs and opinions onto their god. A bundle of new studies from Nicholas Epley, at the University of Chicago, suggests that that is exactly what happens.

What he and his colleagues did was to subtly manipulate people's own opinions, and see if that affected their ideas about what God's opinions were.

So, for example, in one study he had people read two arguments, pro-and anti-affirmative action. In the 'pro-policy' condition, the 'pro' argument was strong and the 'anti' argument weak. In the 'anti-policy' condition, the strength of the arguments was reversed.

This had the desired effect on the subjects own opinions. Whether they were pro- or anti affirmative action was influenced by which arguments they read.

Then he asked them about what the average American thought about the topic, and also what George Bush thought. As you can see in the graph, this didn't change regardless of how their own beliefs have been manipulated.

Their beliefs about what god thought did change, however. In fact, the correlation between their own opinions and what they themselves thought was very strong.

Now, what's interesting is that their beliefs about Bill Gates' opinions also mirrored their own. The thing about Bill Gates is that he's generally admired, but nobody really knows what his opinion is on this topic. So they were free to invent it.

They did another, somewhat more sophisticated experiment that showed something similar. Basically, if you change people's attitudes to the death penalty, then that changes whether they think God is pro- or anti-death penalty.

This is all good stuff. But it gets really interesting when you look at some of the brain scans they did. In these scans, they asked subjects to think about attitudes to euthanasia. First, their own attitude. Then the average American's attitude. And finally God's attitude.

The first brain image shows the difference between thinking about your own opinions and thinking about the average American's opinions. You can see that some bits light up, indicating that there is a difference between the two thought processes. The brain recognises that the average American has a different opinion.

Looking next the brain image, which shows thinking about God's opinions compared with the average American's. Again, some differences. According to this brain, God does not think the same as an average American.

Now look at the last brain image in the panel. This takes the brain activity of someone thinking of their own opinion, and subtracts that from the brain activity of that same person thinking of god's opinions. And guess what? They are exactly the same.

'What would jesus do?' It turns out that what Jesus would do is exactly what 'I' would do - at least in so far as figuring out what Jesus's opinions are. Thinking about God's opinions and thinking about your own opinions uses an identical thought process.

This is a fascinating result. It suggests that people use God not to inform their own decision making, but to reinforce it. Here's what the study's authors conclude:

People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God’s beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing.

Now, this doesn't show that religion has no influence on attitudes and opinions. Other research has shown that it does. But it does show is that people can and do reinvent their god to suit their own beliefs.

They make god in their own image.

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Epley N, Converse BA, Delbosc A, Monteleone GA, & Cacioppo JT (2009). Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 19955414

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

Someone to blame when disaster strikes

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Here's a Friday evening paradox for you. For most atheists, the abundance of suffering in the world is a pretty clinching argument against the existence of a moral god. Yet religion seems to thrive in places where suffering is greatest (the graphic shows the correlation across US states between a basket of 'suffering' measures and belief in God).

What gives? Kurt Gray, a psychologist at Harvard, has some novel ideas about why this should be.

First off, he points out that we have a tendency to find intelligent agents to explain events - we've got a 'hyperactive agent detection device'. What's more, he suggests, that's particularly important for things that have gone wrong or caused harm. You can understand this in evolutionary terms, because intelligent agents are the biggest threats to survival.

Now, it's true that people also attribute good events to the action of their God. But Gray points out that negative experiences are more powerful, and people are more likely to attribute them to an intentional agent.

In one rather nice study, he gave some 'disaster' scenarios to a group of believers and asked them whether God (they were all Christians, presumably) or a human was to blame.

The scenario was this. A family was picnicking in a valley, when suddenly there was a flood.

The flood was caused by an evil dam worker, but the family escaped with no more than a ruined lunch (human cause, no harm).
The flood was caused by an evil dam worker, and the family were all killed (human cause, harm).
The cause of the flood was unknown, but the family escaped with no more than a ruined lunch (unknown cause, no harm).
The cause of the flood was unknown, and the family were all killed (human cause, harm).

So, for which of these scenarios was God to blame?

Unsurprisingly, God was not held responsible for the first two scenarios. More surprisingly, God wasn't responsible for the third one, in which the family managed to escape.

The only scenario where God was blamed was the last one, where the family were all killed for an unknown reason.

Now this is fascinating stuff, but it doesn't really clinch it for me. Where is the equivalent study, but where there was a positive outcome? Perhaps God would be held equally responsible for that.

Nevertheless, this does show that people only invoke God to give meaning to events if those events have a moral dimension. It's not that they can't understand acausality, it's that they're driven to find an intelligent actor behind harmful events.

Gray's theory gets a bit more complicated from here on. Moral acts require two people - someone to do the act (the agent), and someone to receive it (the patient). This way of thinking is so ingrained that we tend to typecast individuals as either moral agents or moral patients.

Mother Theresa, for example, is typecast as someone who can do good things but is relatively insensitive to pain or pleasure. When people have to choose someone to receive unavoidable pain, they choose Theresa - presumably because they think her to be less sensitive.

Now this is fascinating because people tend to think of God as an agent that can do moral actions, but can't experience them. In other words, God can do good and bad things, but good and bad things can't happen to God.

Bringing all this together, what seems to be happening is that when some piece of bad luck happens, people automatically view it in moral terms. They typecast themselves as moral patients - and that, of course, then means that there must somewhere be a moral agent.

God, according to this theory, is the ultimate moral agent.

Gray concludes that religion, far from being a cause of morality, is actually a consequence of it. Because of the way our minds analyse moral situations, morality actually causes us to invent a god. He says:

God may be more accurately characterized as “God of the Moral Gaps,” a supernatural mind introduced into our perception of the world because of the underlying dyadic structure of morality. Seen in this light, God stems not only from agent detection but from patient detection as well, both of which arise from a persistent need to maintain the moral order of a universe consisting of moral agents and patients. Such a view of God can explain why He thrives on human suffering and why His mind is perceived as curiously one sided.

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Gray K, & Wegner DM (2009). Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind. Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc PMID: 19926831

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

Uncertainty doesn't make people more religious if you first make them feel good about themselves

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:15:00 +0000

A series of studies over recent years have found that if you make people feel uncertain or anxious, they'll respond by turning up the intensity of their religious faith.

Quite why this happens isn't known. It might be that unhappy people turn to their gods. Or it might be the implicit threat to their well being that's triggering the response.

Enter a new study by Aaron Wichman at Western Kentucky University. He used a paper-based task to induce feelings of uncertainty in two groups of undergraduates (he got them to write about a time when they were uncertain).

In the first study, he then got them to write about a time when they had succeeded at something (or, in the control group, when they had failed). The results are shown in the top graph.

The only significant effect was in the group that had to write about a time they were uncertain about something, and then about a time when they had failed. This group had their religious beliefs strengthened.

Wichman concludes that uncertainty "does not result in defensive responding when individuals are given the opportunity to repair self-worth".

In the next experiment, he switched the order around and changed the task. First, he got some of his subjects to do a self-affirmation task (write about their most important value, and why it was important. The rest wrote about their least important value (no self affirmation).

Then he got them to do the uncertainty task (well, half were in the control group that just did a general writing task about TV watching).

The results on this one were a bit more complicated, but basically people who did the self-affirmation task were inoculated against the effects of uncertainty (at least insofar as religiosity goes). People who hadn't done the self-affirmation task got religion, as expected.

What's doubly interesting is that the results weren't affected by how happy or sad people were. It seems that it's not that uncertainty makes people unhappy, it's that it makes then feel threatened - and that's why they turn to religion.

And you can eliminate this effect by first bumping up their self worth!

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Wichman, A. (2009). Uncertainty and religious reactivity: Uncertainty compensation, repair, and inoculation European Journal of Social Psychology DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.712

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

Happy worshippers, unhappy believers

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 22:02:00 +0000

Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a social scientist at Harvard, has been looking at religion and happiness around the world. What he's found is really quite remarkable.

First, some background. Previous studies, mostly done in religious countries like the USA, have tended to find that religious people are, on average, happier (in fact, what's usually measured is 'life satisfaction', since happiness is difficult to compare across cultures).

But simple 'average' levels of happiness obscure a lot of detail. Earlier this year, Luke Galen showed that, even in the USA, convinced non-religious people tend to be quite happy. It's the people who are uncertain about their beliefs who are dissatisfied with life.

Okulicz-Kozaryn has used some fairly sophisticated tools to analyse data from the World Values Survey. Here's the key things that he's found.

Religious people are both happier and unhappier. In other words, they tend to be found at either extremes of the happiness scale.

You can get a feel from this from the graphs shown here. A higher percentage of religious people say that they are extremely happy, compared with convinced atheists. But a higher percentage also say that they're extremely unhappy. Atheists are more likely to report being somewhere in-between.

Religious service-goers tend to be happier. Teasing apart the data in more detail in a multilevel analysis that takes into account all sorts of national-level factors (wealth, democracy, corruption etc) and individual-level factors (personal income, health, education, number of friends, recreational activities, etc) shows that people who go to religious services and belong to religious organisations are happier.

Non-believers tend to be happier. In the same analysis, people who believe in god are much less happy. In other words, the happiest people are those who take part in the social side of religion but don't take all the god stuff too seriously.

The effect depends on how religious the country is. The more religious on average the country is, the happier believers are. In countries that are not very religious, non-believers are happier than believers.

Now this is a very important finding. It suggests that the reason non-believers are generally found to be less happy is because the studies have usually been done in countries where they are the minority.

This might be down to social desirability. In other words, being among like-minded people makes you happier. Also, it might simply be that people who want to fit in are happier. In religious countries, these kinds of people are religious. In non-religious countries, they're non-religious.

Lastly, religion alleviates the effects of unemployment, but only in rich countries. Okulicz-Kozaryn showed that being unemployed makes you unhappy, and that this effect is stronger in rich countries compared with poor ones. Unemployed people who are religious are happier than the non-religious unemployed, but only in rich countries.

He speculates that there is greater social stigma to unemployment in rich countries, and that religion alleviates the misery that this causes.

All in all, some fascinating stuff. It confirms that the religions causes extremes - both high happiness but also high unhappiness. Plus, happiness is mostly linked to social activities.

Most importantly, this study explains the conundrum of why atheist countries, like those in Scandinavia, consistently rank among the happiest. Atheists are happy among like-minded people, and the societies in which they predominate are also rich in the other factors that make people happy - freedom, justice, and equality.

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Okulicz-Kozaryn, A. (2009). Religiosity and life satisfaction across nations Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-15 DOI: 10.1080/13674670903273801

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

International trends in religious belief and participation

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:50:00 +0000

If anybody has a handle on global religious trends, it should be Tom Smith, co-founder of the International Social Survey. He's just produced a report, Religious Change Around the World, that summarizes trends gleaned from opinion survey results around the world

Well, I say summarized, but the full report is 346 pages! OK so the beef of it is in the first 16 pages - the rest of it is a torrent of data. So let me summarize it a bit more for you.

The graph shows trends of some of the key measures of religion from the major surveys - the World Values Survey, the International Social Survey, and the European Social Survey.

The data are from Table 15 in the report, and I have to warn you that it's a bit of a bodge job. The data on religion over time are patchy at best. And what Smith has done here is a simple average across countries - they aren't weighted for population, so Belgium counts as much as India.

What's more, these survey over-represent the wealthy nations. If anything, you would expect that to produce a bias in favour of a global increase in religion. That's because these countries start out less religious than average. The countries that aren't in the survey, on the other hand, tend to start out at the top end of the religion scale, so there's not much scope for them to go up.

And the national trends are all over the place. Some countries are up, and some countries are down. So the average trend doesn't tell you anything about what's happening in any one country.

Even so, there seem to be some interesting global trends. It looks like more people say that they believe in god or the afterlife, although fewer pray every day. But the number of people actively participating has slipped, and fewer people claim a religious affiliation.

Over on Science+Religion Today, Smith talks about what might be behind this apparent drop in religious membership:

Partly this is due to the fact that, over time, governments and other institutions have taken over many of the societal roles that religions used to dominate (e.g. state welfare programs vs. alms for the poor). Partly this is due to religion becoming more individualized and less institutional. And partly, it is due to the fact that society in general has changed more rapidly than religions have.

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

Do atheists make better parents?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:35:00 +0000

I've done a few posts recently about fertility, so how about the next stage, parenthood? How do non-religious parents differ from religious ones?

Here's a study by Bart Duriez, from the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium, which looks into just that. He quizzed over 900 secondary school students in Belgium about their religious attitudes and their parents approaches to parenting. He also asked their parents the same questions.

Duriez used a rather nifty measure of religion, specially developed at the Center for Developmental Psychology in Leuven. It separates Christian beliefs along two dimensions: how strong is their belief in the transcendent, and how literal (or fundamentalist) are their beliefs.

Their measured four different aspects of parenting style: support, regulation, extrinsic goal promotion (i.e. wealth, popularity, good looks), and conservation goal promotion (i.e. conformity and tradition).

So... drum roll... who makes better parents?

Well, it turns out that there was no difference between atheists and strong religious believers on the amount of support given to children, how much parental control there was, and whether the parents promoted so-called 'materialist' ideas (extrinsic goals).

But there was a strong an consistent difference on conservation goal promotion. Religious parents were more likely to promote conformity and tradition, rather than openness to change. Previous studies have found that a parental focus on goal conservation leads to decreased well-being and increased authoritarianism.

You might expect that fundamentalists were more conservative, but this study didn't find that. Biblical literalism was not independently related to conservation goal promotion.

It's the the intensity of beliefs, rather than the parents' so-called 'cognitive style', that matters. Where biblical literalism did have an effect was on materialism - fundamentalists were less worldly.

Previous studies have found a link between religion and parental control, and Duriez & Co speculate that their failure to find the same may be a statistical aberration. They conclude:

... although adolescents of religious parents may be less likely to engage in problem behaviors, this might be accompanied by a rigid and closed-minded functioning.

So, who makes better parents? It depends what you mean by 'better'.

____________________________________________________________________
Duriez, B., Soenens, B., Neyrinck, B., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2009). Is Religiosity Related to Better Parenting?: Disentangling Religiosity From Religious Cognitive Style Journal of Family Issues, 30 (9), 1287-1307 DOI: 10.1177/0192513X09334168

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

Religious brain, pragmatist brain

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:10:00 +0000

Here's a brain-scanning study with a difference. Most such tudies try to work out which parts of the brain are activated when people have religious thoughts. This new one looks at whether religious people have more or fewer nerve cells in different parts of their brains.

It's by the team lead by Jordan Grafman that published a study earlier in the year on brain activation. This latest study uses data from the same brain scans.

Basically, the deal is that they boiled their subjects' religious beliefs down to four factors:

Intimacy of relationship with God, including praying and religious participation.
Religiosity of upbringing
Pragmatism (which covers the sorts of ideas that the non-religious would agree with)
Fear of God’s anger

Then they looked at the thickness of the cerebral cortex, and measured which bits were thicker (or thinner) in subjects that endorsed each of these beliefs.

The idea is that the thicker bits have more neurones, which means that they work harder. If you know what those regions that have more neurones do, then you can start to figure out what religion (and non-religion) actually is, at least in terms of brain processing.

The first factor, intimacy with god, was greater in people who had more neurones in an area of the brain that deals with interpersonal relationships.

Now, that's interesting stuff because it shows that people who have a prediliction for feeling intimate with God (praying to god, going to church) may essentially be highly social. The God thing is just an extension of that into the supernatural.

The other interesting thing to ponder, according to the researchers, is that this same bit of the brain is also associated with mental disorders. People with a lot of neurones in this area are at risk of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and people with few neurones are at risk of schizophrenia.

Here's what they conclude from that:

We speculate that the range of RMTG volumes can be viewed as a spectrum, in which high RMTG volume is associated with stereotyped and ritualistic behavior, high-normal volume is associated with religious behavior (which, we should note, is by definition ritualistic), low-normal volume is associated with non-religiosity, and pathologically low volume is associated with schizophrenia (in which disorganized behavior and aberrant religiosity, with blurred boundaries between the self and God, may occur).

The other interesting factor was number 3 - the 'non-religious' factor. This was associated with a part of the brain involved in switching to different perspectives. That suggests that people who are more able to take different perspectives may take a more skeptical, worldly attitude.

Finally, factor 4, fear of god, was associated with fewer neurones in a region associated with empathy and the ability to figure out what's going on in other people's minds. It also helps with using memories to deal with current situations. The researchers suggest that people deficient in this region may fear god essentially because they don't feel confident that they know what god is going to do next.

Now, this is all correlational stuff. It doesn't tell us whether people are born this way, or if these regions of the brain expand (or contract) as a result of life experiences.

Factor 2, religious upbringing, hit a blank. You could take this to mean that having a religious upbringing does not change your brain in any detectable way. But it might simply be that the bits it changes are the same bits that are associated with religious beliefs.

The researchers draw two overall conclusions from this. Firstly, this is more evidence that there is no special bit of the brain for 'religion'. Rather, religion taps into neural pathways that evolved for other reasons:

This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say ‘‘by product’’) of social cognition and behavior.

Secondly, the type of god a religious person believes in is a consequence of their underlying neural makeup:

...the current study suggests that evolution of certain areas that advanced understanding and empathy towards our fellow human beings (such as BA 7, 11 and 21) may, at the same time, have allowed for a relationship with a perceived supernatural agent (God) based on intimacy rather than fear.

In other words, it seems that the way a religious person conceives of their god is a reflection of their own ingrained personality.

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Kapogiannis D, Barbey AK, Su M, Krueger F, & Grafman J (2009). Neuroanatomical variability of religiosity. PloS one, 4 (9) PMID: 19784372

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

Why Rabbi Sacks is wrong on religion and fertility

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:25:00 +0000

Rabbi Johnathan Sacks has been hitting the headlines recently with his latest warnings on the perils of nonbelief. Michael Blume has dug out the transcript of his speech, so you can get it from the horses mouth.

Most of it is the usual stuff... but then comes the bit where he says that atheists are slowly killing Europe because they're failing to have enough kids.

This is a fascinating claim, not only because it's factually incorrect but also because of what it reveals about the religious mindset.

First, to deal with the factual inaccuracy. (I'll dispense quickly with the obvious howler: that Europe is the only region experiencing population decline. North America, China, and Australasia are also shrinking).

I'm more interested in what I've shown in the graph, which is that the most religious countries in Europe actually have a lower fertility rate than the most secular ones!

Now, it is true that, within these nations, the most religious people tend to have more offspring. And yet when you look at the country level, the effect is reversed. How can this be?

Well, when you see an effect like this, it's big red flag warning that there's a third factor that connects religion with fertility at a social level, only in the opposite direction. And if Sacks had bothered to talk to a demographer, he could've easily found out what it was (but then I guess he would've got no headlines!).

You see, the factors causing the low birth rates in Europe are fairly well understood, and can be put simply: it's a clash between women's aspirations and societal expectations.

In traditional, patriarchal societies, women have few opportunities other than the role of mother. In Europe and other modern societies, their opportunities are far greater.

The highest fertility rates occur in those European societies where women are enabled to achieve both a career and a family. In a recent paper, the Italian demographer Alessandro Rosina wrote that this will occur in:

...contexts and social categories in which childcare services are more readily available, gender asymmetries are less evident, economic conditions are better, and modern and post-modern values are more diffused

And this is the missing factor that accounts for low fertility in religious countries. Religion is closely connected with conservative values. In traditional, highly religious countries, women have to choose between career and motherhood. In countries that have made the transition to modern values, they can have both.

So much for the statistics, what about the religious mindset on fertility? Well, the reason that fertility is lower in wealthy countries in general (leaving religion out of it) is that whereas children were once a financial asset (not only do they help out on the farm, but they are also your old-age pension), now they are a financial burden.

As a result, birthrates fall. Is this a problem? Sacks thinks so, and as evidence quotes approvingly the 3rd-century BC Greek historian Polybius:

"The fact is, that the people of Hellas had entered upon the false path of ostentation, avarice and laziness, and were therefore becoming unwilling to marry, or if they did marry, to bring up the children born to them; the majority were only willing to bring up at most one or two."

[Sacks:] That is why Greece died. That is where Europe is today

Now, Sacks doesn't actually know what the fertility rate in ancient Greece was. I know that, because the leading authority on the subject, Walter Scheidel of Stanford, doesn't know either. However, there's no basis for Sacks' claim that low fertility 'is why Greece died". (But see footnote.*)

But why should it matter? So what if Europe's population decreases?

Well Polybius is notable because his is the first voice in history to express the fear that 'our' tribe is going to be overwhelmed because 'we' are not breeding as fast as 'them'. It's a fear that has echoed down the ages, reaching a zenith in the fascist idea of motherhood as a national duty. You can see it in full flood in modern movements like Quiverfull.

Put simply, this is fertility as an extension of tribal warfare.

Of course, religion is closely linked with other aspects of tribalism (or group cohesion, as a sociologist might put it). Rabbi Sacks' goes on to say:

The only serious philosophical question is “Why should I have a child?” And our culture is not giving a very easy answer to that question.

He doesn't himself answer that question, but his polemic gives the game away!

*Footnote: Although we don't know the fertility rate of Ancient Greece, we do known that Mycenean Greece experienced a population crash. In the 500 years that followed, the population of Greece increased perhaps 10-fold. By Polybius' day it had reached the point where the population could only be sustained by dominating neighbouring countries and sucking resources in - a fact that probably explains as well as anything the Greek's subsequent demise.

Europe is currently running at 220% of biological capacity. Similar to ancient Greece, we're pillaging the rest of the world to maintain our lifestyle. Rabbis Sacks urges us to be custodians of future generations, and yet a swelling population is the greatest enemy that our children face.

Having a large family is not self-sacrifice. It's the ultimate in selfishness.

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

Religion causes inequality (or is it the other way around?)

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:50:00 +0000

In the previous post I wrote about new research linking income inequality to religious attendance. The supposition is that the stresses and bad social conditions that are often found in nations with high inequality goad people into church. It also seems to make them generally more religious.

But hang on! Perhaps that's back to front. Perhaps, in fact, religion causes inequality. Plenty of people think that's the case, and there's some good scientific theories which suggest it should do exactly that. There's also evidence that belief in God and belief in government are alternative reactions to conditions of uncertainty. And David Stasavage at NYU has shown that non-religious people are more likely to favour government welfare schemes.

So does religion help to explain national differences in income inequality? The unfortunate truth is that right now it's not possible to tell. There simply aren't enough good-quality historical data to decide whether changes in religiosity come first, before changes in inequality.

However, it's still possible to have a crack at putting the theory on a slightly more rigorous footing by using multivariate analysis. In other words, look at the correlation between religion and inequality while adjusting for the other factors that also cause inequality.

The only analysis of this type that I'm aware of was published last year in a student-run journal, the Journal of Politics and International Affairs. The author, Priyanka Palani, controlled for the numbers of elderly people in a nation, as well as education, GDP and whether the nation has an advanced economy (according to the IMF). The correlation with income inequality remained significant.

Well, that's interesting but I don't find it too convincing. The problem is that there are many other factors that affect income inequality that weren't included in the model. Here are a few that I am aware of:

GDP: richer countries have more spare cash to spend on welfare.
GDP growth rate: high economic growth (independent of actual GDP) is supposed to reduce inequality.
Proportional representation: democracies with PR are more likely to elect left-wing governments than democracies that used a 'first past the post' system. The reasons are complex, but have to do with the way political parties can build coalitions.
Migration: high numbers of economic migrants increase inequality, because they are prepared to work for lower wages than the locals.
Working-age population: nations with a demographic 'hump' (i.e. a baby boom) experience low inequality when that hump is at employment age, and higher inequality when they retire.
Ethnic fractionalisation: people are less likely to support government welfare if they think that the money is going to go to people from different ethnic groups.
Trade openness: dropping trade barriers increases income inequality.

I put all these factors into a model, correlating them with prayer frequency (which I previously found to be strongly related to income inequality).

With 54 nations in the analysis, the only factor that correlated with inequality was religion! None of the others had any effect.

However, that's probably because poorer countries operate on different economic rules than rich ones do. So I re-ran the analysis just using the richest two-thirds of the nations (Mexico was the poorest one included).

This time three factors came out to have a significant effect: GDP, PR voting, and working-age population. The number of migrants just failed to reach statistical significance. All told, the factors explained nearly 80% of the variation in income inequality.

But guess what. Even after controlling for all these factors, religion still had a significant effect. And the effect was powerful: the four most powerful factors (religion being one of them) all had about the same effect.

I played around with the stats in a number of other ways, mixing things around. But the effect of religion was doggedly persistent.

I also looked at the correlates of government welfare spending. This is a tougher nut because the data aren't so good. I controlled for various national-level factors that are supposed to explain differences in welfare spending (GDP, number of school-age children, number of retirement-age people, proportional representation again and also ethnic fractionalisation).

The result? No effect of religion! I had better luck when looking at social wages, which is that part of government welfare spent on taking care of people out of work. Here there was a significant effect of religion.

Does that prove that religion actually causes income inequality? No, it doesn't. But it does help buttress the idea that there's a feedback loop at work here - that inequality leads to more religion, and more religion in turn leads to more inequality.

If that's true, then it raises an interesting possibility. You see, dynamic feedback loops can lead to a system with multiple stable states. In other words, a nation could settle at a position of high inequality and high religion, or low inequality and low religion. Both states would resist change, and it would take quite a hefty kick to move from one to the other.

Could this help explain the persistence of religion and inequality in some parts of the modern world?

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

Income inequality drives church attendance

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:15:00 +0000

The Dutch press is reporting a new study with an international perspective on what drives church attendance (the authors are Stijn Ruiter, senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and Frank van Tubergen, a professor of sociology in Utrecht).

What they set out to do was to compare the major theories on what causes religion, using data from the World Values Survey and other sources. Broadly speaking, you can summarize these theories like this:

Religious regulation: a close relationship between state and church tends to turn people off it.
Education: better educated people abandon religion
Economic security: if people don't have to worry about their future, gods lose their appeal.
Individualization: religion is a social phenomenon, and people are only religious because everyone around them is.

What Ruiter and van Tubergen did was a multi-level analysis. In other words, they looked at the characteristics of individuals and compared them with their churchgoing habits. And they also looked at the characteristics of nations, and looked to see what effect that had on individual churchgoing.

This multilevel analysis is a very powerful. But one downside is that it needs a lot of data, and the sort of data it needs aren't available for a lot of countries. In fact, it's mostly available only for rich, Christian countries. Still, they included 60 in their analysis, which is quite a pool.

By far and away the strongest predictor of how often a person goes to church is whether they had religious parents. That's not too surprising. But what is surprising is that, even after controlling for that effect, one of the most powerful predictors is how religious everyone else's parents are. In other words, one of the major deciding factors in whether or not you go to church is whether you grew up in a religious country.

Another important factor was religious regulation. In countries with a strong state interference in religion, attendance goes down. Other studies suggest that's probably because when people feel pressured into going to Church, they don't enjoy it.

One thing that didn't have much effect was education. There was no clear effect of average education in a country. But there was a slight effect of individual education - more educated people are slightly less likely to be churchgoers. That's probably because education is double-edged when it comes to religion. It decreases beliefs, but it also increases 'community-mindedness'. In other words, educated people tend to get involved in community activities.

The final factor was income inequality. In line with other studies, they found that both income inequality and low state welfare spending are associated with more religion:

...we find that attendance rates are particularly high in countries with more socioeconomic inequalities and fewer social welfare expenditure. This effect equally applies to both poor and rich people, which is in line with the idea that because of economic mobility and the possibility of unemployment in the (nearby) future also the more affluent population feels more insecure in countries with more inequalities and without a well-developed social welfare system.

We also see that people with a lower income and who are unemployed attend religious meetings more often, and we find an enduring effect of growing up in times of war. In summary, the results of our study suggest that personal and societal insecurities play a crucial role in explaining cross-national variation in religious attendance.

Now this is particularly interesting because it backs up what I found in my own study, published earlier this year. In that study, I looked (in a rather simpler analysis) at the country-level factors that correlate with how often people pray. I found that income inequality was one of the strongest.

So the two studies complement each other. Religious attendance and religious belief are related, but they are not the same. At yet both these two key aspects of religion both decrease in countries with strong social systems where people have less to worry about.

But by now people have probably spotted the potential flaw, which is shared by all these kinds of correlational studies: correlation does not mean causation! So which is it? Does inequality really lead to more religion? Or could it be that religion causes inequality?

That's a good question - and it's a topic for the next post!

Hat tip: David Flint of Humanists4Science.

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Stijn Ruiter, & Frank van Tubergen (2009). Religious Attendance in Cross-National Perspective: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Countries American Journal of Sociology (November)

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

Live long and be atheist

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:07:00 +0000

The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. Basically what they've done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea is that what most people want is a life that's both long and happy.

Costa Rica came out top, followed by the usual gaggle of Northern European Countries (and Canada).

Now, there's an 'ecological' problem in this analysis, in that the people with long lives in a nation aren't necessarily the happiest. What's more, happiness might be very unevenly distributed in some countries.

And being grumpy might have its plus side - in the news yesterday was an Australian study which claimed that grumpy people are less prone to errors of judgement!

Be that as it may, whenever these national statistics come out I always like to correlate them against religion, to see how they stack up. So here's the results for this one.

What I've done is plot the percentage of hard-core non-believers in each country against the 'happy-life-years'.

In the top graph, it's the percentage of people who say they are 'confirmed atheists'. In the bottom graph, it's the people who say that religion is 'not at all important' to them.

There is a weak, but statistically significant relationship - especially with the unimportance of religion. What's more, the correlation is about 50% stronger than with happiness alone.

However, digging around in the data shows that the is mostly driven by life expectancy. Average happiness, by itself, is not related to the number of atheists, and only marginally related to the number of non-religious.

Now the interesting thing is that happiness is strongly correlated with life expectancy (as you might expect). So you also would expect a correlation of happiness with atheism - simply because they both correlate with life expectancy.

The fact that this does not happen suggests a negative interaction. What may be happening is that some countries with short life expectancy are particularly religious. That makes them happier than you would expect, and confounds the straightforward link between long life expectancy, happiness and atheism.

To put it another way, turning to religion has the effect of increasing happiness. But good life expectancy is more important, and countries with good life expectancy are the happiest and least religious.
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This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Is ritual purification brain down to a brain short circuit?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:40:00 +0000

You might have seen the recent study which found that the subtle smell of Windex (a brand of window cleaner) makes people more charitable. Time magazine, for one, carried a report - which got up the nose of a writer on the GetReligion blog. Here's the offending paragraph:

Nevertheless, both morality researchers and olfactory scientists agree that people do strongly associate physical cleanliness with purity of conscience. It is the notion at the heart of adages like “cleanliness is next to godliness” and evidenced by the widespread use of cleansing ceremonies to wash away sins in various religions around the world. (Truth be told, that practice is merely an extrapolation of an evolutionary strategy to avoid disease.)

Well, that doesn't sound very likely to me either. There is a clear evolutionary link, but it's not so banal as encouraging people to wash their hand so as not to get sick.

The evolutionary origins of our moral sense is a hot topic at the moment, but what's becoming clear is that physical and moral disgust are tightly linked (we pull the same faces for both, for example).

Why? Well, moral disgust probably probably evolved out of the neural systems that originally served to provoke physical disgust. And they're still linked. Which suggests that the reason we associated cleanliness with godliness is down to a neural short circuit - a 'design' flaw that reveals evolution at work.

In other words, ritual purification may well stem from the fact we have a cognitive malfunction that makes us associate cleanliness with morality. Assuming that, the interesting question to ask is what the consequences? The 'Windex' study suggests that purification has a morality-reinforcing effect, but there may also be a darker side, according to a study published earlier this year.

That was a study into the effects of hand-washing, by Simone Schnall and colleagues from the University of Plymouth in the UK. In a cunningly experimental design, they quizzed students on morality - but half of them were asked to wash their hands first (they went through some hoops to make sure the students didn't think the hand-washing was connected to the experiment).

And here's what they found. Students with clean hands actually rated a series of morally ambiguous actions as less wrong than students who hadn't washed their hands.

The difference was particularly big for judgements where the students were asked to imagine themselves doing the action. For example, they were asked to imagine they found a wallet with money in it and the address of the owner, and that they had decided to keep it on the grounds that the owner was rich and they were poor.

Is that an immoral act? Well, it's questionable, of course, but the point is that those who had washed their hands were less likely to think it immoral.

This result reminds me of other studies which suggest that people who are very firm in their moral convictions are actually more likely to act immorally, and also that we seem to have an internal accounting system that adds up good and bad deeds, and pushes us to do bad or good if we're getting out of equilibrium.

Maybe if you're in a clean environment, then you act in a morally clean way. But if you personally are ritually pure, then that makes it easier to do morally dubious things.
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Schnall S, Benton J, & Harvey S (2008). With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19 (12), 1219-22 PMID: 19121126

Liljenquist K, et al (2009). The smell of virtue: clean scents promote reciprocity and charity. Psychological Science in press

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

Schnall S, Benton J, & Harvey S (2008). With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19 (12), 1219-22 PMID: 19121126

The inheritance of religion

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:01:00 +0000

An earlier post looked at the connection in the USA between religion and a high teen pregnancy rate. High fertility and religion often goes together, and whenever this topic comes up the immediate question is: will the religious inexorably 'out-breed' the nonreligious?

The answer to that rather depends on how religion (or lack of it) is transmitted through the generations. Luckily enough, there's just been a very nice study on this by Vern Bengston, Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California.

Bengston and colleagues analysed data from the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which has been following over 3000 Californians for over 30 years. They now have over 4 generations in their database.

In 1971, the first year of the study, they surveyed three generations: grandparents (generation 1), parents (generation 2), and children (generation 3). In the paper, they also looked at data from 2000, by which time generation 2 had become grandparents, generation 3 had become parents, and a new generation, generation 4, had arrived on the scene (generation1 seem to have disappeared !).

Over that time, religious affiliation plummeted. In 1971, only 5% of generation 2 (parents) said they were unaffiliated. By 2000, 33% of this same generation were unaffiliated. In generation 4, the non-affiliated rate was 37%.

But what about religious beliefs? In each survey, they asked people how religoius they were (on a 1-4 scale), and also a number of questions related to how traditional/literal their religious views were.

The results are shown in the first figure. The symbols on the left represent the various generations in 1971, and on the right the generations in 2000. Lines connect generations that appear in both surveys.

On the whole, people who were surveyed both times haven't changed much. Mothers and fathers in 1971 are less religious in 2000, and daughters (but less so sons) are more religious.

But the major difference is generational. Grandparents in 2000 are less religious than grandparents in 1971. Parents now are less religious than parents then. And the new generation (generation 4) is least religious of all.

Now, they don't give any information on how many children the religious participants had compared with the non-religious, but it's probably safe to assume that they had more.

So, with each generation, the religious have more offspring. And yet their numbers decrease!

This paradox is, of course, easily explained. Although there is a small genetic component that predisposes to agnosticism and atheism, they are in fact social phenomena. Irreligion is not inherited. It's learned.

This can be seen most clearly with conservative religious beliefs. Twin studies consistently show that this is the component of religion with the largest genetic component. What's more, conservative Christians have the highest birth rates. Even so, conservative religious beliefs have collapsed with the passing of older generations.

Religion, even conservative religion, is not a gene to be inherited. It's a meme to be transmitted.

The study had another tidbit of information, and that's about how much influence grandparents have over their grandchildren's religiosity. The answer: not a lot.

What we're looking at in this graph is the correlation between the religion of the grandparents and that of the grandchildren, after adjusting for the religion of the parents. So this is the direct effect of grandparents, not the indirect effect (via their children and then on to their grandchildren).

In 2000, grandmothers had a little bit of influence over the religion of their granddaughters. That was particularly true for conservative religious beliefs.

But nobody listened to their grandfathers, and grandsons didn't pay much attention to their grandmothers.

What's surprising is how this has changed from 1971. I haven't done a graph for these data, but basically in 1971 grandparents influenced their grandchildren's church attendance, but less so their beliefs - and they had absolutely no effect over their conservative religious beliefs.

In other words the role of grandparents in transmitting religion has changed completely in the past 30 years - more evidence that the nature of religion in society is changing.

But there's a bigger message here, and that's the magnitude of the influence. Even when it comes to grandmothers and their granddaughter's religiousness, the strongest link, the effect is very weak.

And what this means is that the transmission of religion can be very rapid. The world of our grandparents is already ancient history - at least as far as attitudes and beliefs go.
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Bengtson, V., Copen, C., Putney, N., & Silverstein, M. (2009). A Longitudinal Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion International Sociology, 24 (3), 325-345 DOI: 10.1177/0268580909102911

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

The doctors who hasten death

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:58:00 +0000

This Fridays' Guardian reports on a new survey which found that a third of doctors in the UK have taken treatment decisions they thought would hasten a patient's death.

The sorts of patients we're talking about here are those who are already near death. Doctors either give doses of pain killers that are high enough to risk causing death, or they withhold treatment that could prolong life.

Around 30% of the doctors surveyed said they had done this at some stage with the expectation that it would cause premature death. Another 7% said that they had done this with the intention of actually causing death. Here's an example, given in the paper, of withholding treatment with the intention of bringing about an early death:

A doctor working in a critical care unit reported on the care of a woman in her 60s who died in hospital of pneumonia, associated with breast cancer. A decision was made not to use artificial ventilation and various treatments, including oxygen,
renal replacements and cardiac inotropes (drugs that affect the strength of heart contractions) were withdrawn. Morphine was given, with a strong increase on the day of death, and a benzodiazepine.

The withholding and withdrawing of treatments were done with ‘the explicit intention’ of hastening the end of life, and the medications given were considered probable or certain to contribute to hastening the end of life. These actions were felt to have shortened life by less than 24 hours.

The reasons given for the withdrawal of therapies included the fact that the patient had pain, other symptoms, had no chance of improvement, that further treatment would have been futile and would have increased her suffering, and that the patient and relatives had asked for this. The decision was discussed with the patient and the discussion included the likely effect on length of life. Discussions with medical colleagues, nursing staff and relatives were also reported.

The patient had made a clear request for the end of her life to be hastened as had relatives and nursing staff. A GP, a specialist in pain relief, and a spiritual caregiver, as well as nurses and relatives had been involved in her care in the last month of life. The doctor had mixed views about euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, feeling that euthanasia in the presence of an incurable and painful illness ought to be allowed, but being opposed to physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia where no such illness was present.

Most of the doctors (65%) were neutral about religion, 21% were non-religious, and 14% were religious. I've plotted out the data: as you might expect, the non-religious were much more likely to have prescribed a treatment that they thought might hasten death.

Now, there's no more analysis than that. It wasn't a random sample of physicians - neurologists, palliative medicine and care of the elderly specialists were over sampled. And men were more likely than women to have hastened a patients' death (as well as, presumably, less religious). So we can't be sure that this is an effect caused by religion.

Still, it seems likely given the strong anti-euthanasia position taken by most religious authorities. And it meshes nicely with the fact that religious patients are more likely to request heroic (but futile) end-of-life treatments.

Of course, end-of-life care is a complicated, multi-dimensional problem. However, in my opinion and the opinion of most humanists, prolonging life to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences for patient and family, may not always be the best course.

Prof Seale, who did the survey, agrees. Here's what he concludes:

Doctors who said they were religious or who opposed the legalisation of assisted dying were less likely to report decisions where they expected or intended to hasten the end of life. This may be because sanctity of life is a more pressing concern for these doctors than quality of life and may be a cause for concern if this results in patients with similar needs and preferences receiving different treatment.

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Seale C (2009). Hastening death in end-of-life care: A survey of doctors. Social science & medicine (1982) PMID: 19837498

This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

The Malthusian time bomb

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:47:00 +0000

Here's a study that Razib over at Gene Expression picked up on last month. Basically, it's a very simple regression of religiosity versus teen births in US states.

Importantly, it's an ecological study. That means it's not looking necessarily at whether religious teens get pregnant more often. It's looking at whether states with a lot of religious people also have a disproportionate level of teen births.

At a policy level, that's the interaction that's actually more useful because it includes the unintended consequences (like reduced access to contraception, changed attitudes towards female roles, etc).

Anyway, the correlation is dramatic. States with a highest numbers of religious people have three times the teen birth rate.

What could be the cause of this? Well, there could be confounding factors. The researchers did adjust for differences in income and abortion rates between states, and that did not have much effect. Razib points out that religious states also have a high proportion of blacks. No doubt there are other systematic differences that could account for the relationship, at least in statistical terms.

But this correlation is very strong, and it does fit in with other evidence that religion can encourage high fertility. Conservative protestants not only have more children, they have them earlier. The social expectations for young women are different.

And it seems to be the beliefs themselves that are important, rather than social aspects of religion. The average level of religious service attendance was not a strong predictor of teen birth rate. The strongest predictor was beliefs - especially beliefs that scripture should be taken literally and that prayers are likely to be answered.

That's not to say that Protestantism necessarily leads to a high birth rate. New research shows that, in Switzerland at the turn of the 18th/19th century, it was Protestants who had low birth rates, and Catholics who had high birth rates. The author, Anne-Françoise Praz (University of Geneva) explains that, in the Catholic canton she studied:

...the religious discourse supported the husband's rights to frequent sexual intercourse and encouraged him to trust Providence to bring up many children, thus sustaining high levels of fertility. The political repression of public discourse on sexuality defeated every attempt of contesting the husband's marital rights and the Catholic doctrine of procreation. Sexual taboos were particularly severe for women and their total ignorance of sexual matters weakened their bargaining power in fertility decisions.

There clear parallels here with conservative protestantism in the USA. Either Protestantism or Catholicism can cause problems - what matters is whether the religion is conservative (i.e. traditional) or not.

So what's all this got to do with a Malthusian time bomb? Well, population levels are determined not just by fertility rate (number of children per adult) but also by generation time.

Conservative religious groups not only have more children per adult, but they churn out the generations faster. The two effects combine to generate a population explosion (maladaptive, in the case of the modern world).

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Strayhorn JM, & Strayhorn JC (2009). Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States. Reproductive health, 6 PMID: 19761588

This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Now tweeting

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:17:00 +0000

As we all know, social media like twitter and Facebook are slowly eroding society as we know it and destroying our children's brains. Now I've brought the end of the world one step closer by setting up a twitter feed and facebook page for this blog!

If you are a twitter or a facebooker, this means that you can get notification of new posts by 'following' the twitter feed or becoming a facebook fan (OK so you already knew that!).

If you're neither of these things, you can still get alerts in all the usual ways, like:

Subscribing to the newsfeed, either with 'live bookmarks' on your web browser or using a news reader (like feedly or Netvibes)
Following on Google Friends-Connect, Blogged, ScienceBlips, or Technorati
Signing up for email updates
Reading any of the sites where the feed appears, like Planet Humanism, Atheist Blogs Aggregated, ScienceBlips

Or, of course, you can pop back here from time to time!

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This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

When people stop believing in God... they go mental?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 20:49:00 +0000

Probably the most famous thing that GK Chesterton never said was that:

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.

Even if he never did say those words, the quote clearly strikes a chord with a lot of people. The meme has legs.

But is it true? A lot of people these days are moving away from traditional religions into various kinds of 'New Age' beliefs. Are they really more delusional than the religious - and how do they compare to atheists, for that matter.

This new study comes from Queensland, Australia. They've been following a bunch of kids since they were born in the early 80s. They were 21 years old at the last assessment - which is where these data are from.

Basically, they just asked them two simple questions: "Do you believe in God?" (Yes/No/Unsure), and "Do you believe in a higher power?" (Yes/No/Unsure). This latter group they designated 'New Agers". They also asked them a standard battery of questions about delusional beliefs.

The good news for atheists is that they scored lower for delusional beliefs than either the religious or the New Agers.

The graph up top is not particularly easy to understand! So let me talk you through it. What it shows is the relative probability (compared to atheists) of agreeing with a delusional statement for the religious and the New Agers. The probabilities are more interesting than the raw data because they are adjusted for demographic differences between the two groups (including drug use).

There were 21 statements in the test - I've pulled out all the ones where the religious were significantly worse than the atheists, plus a few more that were interesting.

Overall, the New Agers were more delusional than the Religious. That was particularly true for belief in witchcraft and telepathy (not shown in the graph). But the New Agers were also more likely to think that people are not what they seem, that they are being persecuted, that electrical devices like computers can control their thoughts, and that their thoughts are 'echoed back'.

But the religious, while scoring lower overall than the New Agers (although still worse than the atheists) have their own delusions. It's probably not surprising, given the nature of their religious upbringing (an even mix of Catholics and Protestants, with a smattering of other religions), that they're more likely to believe in an imminent apocalypse and also that they are wretched sinners. Neither of these strike me as particularly healthy beliefs.

Bizarrely enough, however, they also are more likely to think that things in print and on TV have been written especially for them. And, although they score lower than the New Agers, they're more likely than atheists to think that their thoughts are echoed back to them.

What to make of all this? Well, this is yet another cross-sectional study, so causality is hard to pin down. Some of the differences in beliefs (apocalypse, sinning, telepathy, witches) might well be a result of the different teachings.

In other words, if you drop out of organised religion but are suitably delusional, then then you might well switch to a belief in witches or telepathy.

But there probably is also some self selection going on. Religion struggles to be mainstream. If you're too wacky, you may find it hard to fit in - and so end up as part of the 'New Age'. But if you're not wacky enough, you simply transition to atheism.

But what about the two delusions shared by the religious and New Agers? 'Thought echo' is a classic form of auditory hallucination in which you can hear your own thoughts being spoken back to you, either instantaneously or a moment or two later.

Perhaps this is linked to the delusion that make people think the TV announcer is talking specially to them? Perhaps they're hearing their own thoughts in some way? Is this a pointer to a fundamental motivator for religious beliefs?

Fans of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind will be intrigued! (Thanks to David Holmes for reminding recently me of Jaynes' remarkable book).

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Aird, R., Scott, J., McGrath, J., Najman, J., & Al Mamun, A. (2009). Is the New Age phenomenon connected to delusion-like experiences? Analysis of survey data from Australia. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 1-17 DOI: 10.1080/13674670903131843

This work by Tom Rees is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.