Epiphenom

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.

The merry-go-round between uncertainty, error detection, and religion

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:34:00 +0000

This is a post about psychology, and about the how stress, anxiety and uncertainty might lead people to be more religious - and the consequence of that. What triggered it was a NY Times article featuring a recent study. Here's an excerpt:

Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that the boy has no teeth at all. The horses who have pulled his carriage begin to act up; the boy’s family becomes annoyed; then the doctor discovers the boy has teeth after all. And so on. The story is urgent, vivid and nonsensical — Kafkaesque.
After the story, the students studied a series of 45 strings of 6 to 9 letters, like “X, M, X, R, T, V.” They later took a test on the letter strings, choosing those they thought they had seen before from a list of 60 such strings. In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.
The test is a standard measure of what researchers call implicit learning: knowledge gained without awareness. The students had no idea what patterns their brain was sensing or how well they were performing.
But perform they did. They chose about 30 percent more of the letter strings, and were almost twice as accurate in their choices, than a comparison group of 20 students who had read a different short story, a coherent one.
“The fact that the group who read the absurd story identified more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

In other words, when you start to break down people's sense that they understand what's going on, they respond by turning up the 'gain' on pattern detection. Similar things have been seen in previous studies, except in these studies the gain detection is turned up so high that people see things that aren't there at all.

For example, people who are made to feel like they are not in control tend to see patterns that aren't there. And people who are made to feel lonely are more likely to anthropomorphize (i.e. see pets and even gadgets as friends).

The interesting thing is that the NY Times ties this study in with an earlier one by Michael Inzlicht, on how 'error-related negativity' (ERN) predicts academic performance. ERN describes a brain signal that's triggered when you make a mistake.

The idea is that the bigger the ERN signal, the bigger the distress you get from things that don't make sense. Inzlicht showed that people with a big ERN response have better academic performance. They learn better.

The implication is that creating uncertainty increases the ERN, and so improves your ability to detect patterns and learn from mistakes.

Now, what the NY Times didn't pick up on is that Inzlicht published another study earlier this year (I blogged it here). This study showed that religious people have a low ERN.

So uncertainty increases, and religion reduces, ERN. It looks like a feedback mechanism to keep levels of ERN under control by reducing the level of ambiguity and uncertainty in the world (by 'explaining away' mysteries) - at the cost (perhaps) of failing to pick up on real, but obscure patterns.

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Proulx T, & Heine SJ (2009). Connections from Kafka: exposure to meaning threats improves implicit learning of an artificial grammar. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20 (9), 1125-31 PMID: 19656338

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Religion and volunteering

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:39:00 +0000

The last post was on religion and work ethic. So to follow up here's another new paper on a similar topic: religion and volunteering.

Religious people do more voluntary work than non-religious people. According to a June 2009 Canadian report, the 15% people who go to Church every week make up 26% of the volunteer workforce.

It's difficult to figure out exactly why this should be. Is it spiritual beliefs? The evidence I put up in my previous post, linking religious beliefs to a small increase in work ethic, might make lead you to think so. Religious people get an extra reward from volunteering (they usually believe they'll get some kind of bonus from their God): that makes it more attractive.

But maybe it's cultural. Religious people tend to swim in a sea of 'volunteerism', so volunteering might simply be something that's expected of them by their peers. They also get more opportunities to volunteer, by virtue of being plugged into a ready-made volunteer network.

In contrast, non-religious people might be excluded from volunteering because (especially in a religious society), many opportunities for volunteering come with a lot of religious baggage. That can be a turn-off for the non-religious.

The new study, by Bianca Suanet and colleagues at VU University in the Netherlands, is interesting because it takes a fresh angle on the problem (VU University, by the way, has its historical roots as a Christian university).

They looked at two samples of Dutch people, a set who were around 60 years old in 1992, and a set of people who turned 60 in around 2002. In other words, the second set of people was born 10 years later.

They found that 43% of people who were 60 in 1992 did voluntary work, but this had dropped to 37% of those who were 60 in 2002. A small drop, but statistically significant.

Next they looked at the factors that might explain the drop. Most had no effect: it didn't matter whether they were employed, had a father who was a church member, had a mother who did volunteer work, or had well educated parents.

What did matter is their own level of education - highly educated people were 2.7 times more likely to volunteer than people with low education levels. That might be, of course, because highly educated people tend to also have high levels of self-motivation. But presumably the psychological characteristics of the cohorts were the same, which suggests that it's a direct effect of education on volunteerism.

And the other factor that made a difference was religious involvement. People who had religious beliefs but didn't go to Church were not more likely to volunteer. But people who did go to Church were.

For religious non-Christians and Catholics, the effect was impressive - they were over 2.5 times more likely to volunteer than the non-religious. But for practising Calvinists, the effect was dramatic - they were 4.7 times more likely to volunteer.

Now, the actual effects of religion remain pretty small. Overall, they could explain only 16% of the variation among individuals. And religion is only a fraction of that (it's pretty hard to tell from the stats they present, but it probably explains about 5-10% of the variability). It's small, but it's there.

So in light of this, there's one other fascinating fact that comes out from the study. It turns out that, after controlling for all the other factors (including the increase in their education levels and the loss of religious belief), the more recent set of 'oldies' were actually more likely to be volunteers.

In other words, the decline in religion causes a negative hit on volunteering. That's made up for a bit by the increase in education. But there's something else going on that's increasing volunteering.

And that something may well be cultural. To me, it seems likely that Dutch society is reinventing itself as religion becomes increasingly marginalised. Whereas religion and volunteering were once intimately connected, now volunteering is something for non-believers as well (incidentally, this is reflected in the constitution of VU University itself, which transformed itself in the 1960s from a religious university to a secular, state funded one).

So a secular future may not mean a future without volunteers. And the good news from Canada is that this is probably the case.

Canada, like other Western nations, has seen plummeting religious participation (Statistics Canada). And volunteering went down from 191 hours per person in 1987 to 149 hours in 1997 (here's the 1997 report). But the last report shows an uptick, with volunteer rates climbing to 166 hours in 2007.

I think that the take-home from this is that religion probably does stimulate volunteering. But religion is not the only way to achieve this, and it's probably not the best, either.

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Suanet, B., Broese van Groenou, M., & Braam, A. (2009). Changes in volunteering among young old in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2002: the impact of religion, age-norms, and intergenerational transmission European Journal of Ageing, 6 (3), 157-165 DOI: 10.1007/s10433-009-0119-7

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The Protestant 'Work-Shy' Ethic?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:45:00 +0000

At the start of the 20th Century, the sociologist Max Weber came up with a famous theory to explain why Northern Europe and North America were so prosperous: the Protestant Work Ethic.

Basically, the idea was that a unique feature of Protestant Christianity is its emphasis on work as a duty to God. While other religions asked people to do things that were laborious and time consuming, only Protestantism (so the theory went) channelled that religious duty into productive work.

It's important to take some time out here to understand what's meant by 'work ethic'. It certainly isn't simply productivity. The richest, most productive countries actually have the lowest work ethic.

And a lack of 'work ethic' doesn't mean you're lazy or driven only by financial reward. In fact, educated people have a lower 'work ethic' than uneducated people. Clearly educated people aren't lazy - they work hard to get their qualifications and don't get paid to do it.

So 'work ethic' is actually about working for no clear purpose - it's work for work's sake.

Well, in the 100 years since there's been a lot of debate and no clear conclusion about whether Weber was right. But, in theory, it seems plausible. According to economists, people only do work if they are going to get some kind of reward. If you can convince them them that their reward will be 'magical' (some kind of spiritual reward in this life or the next) then you won't have to pay them as much.

In modern economic terms, a Protestant would gain extra 'utility' from doing work, and so they would have additional motivation to work harder.

But even if the idea did hold in the past, does it still work in the modern world? And if it does, how does it work in practice? A new paper by Hans Geser has taken a look.

He scrutinized data from the Christians in the World Values Survey and found that, as far as work ethic goes, Protestantism probably isn't very much different from Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity.

But he did find some interesting relationships with religion in general. Basically, people with stronger religious faith have a stronger work ethic. But other factors of religion - whether people took Church teaching seriously, whether they went to Church, or whether they prayed - seemed to have little or no effect.

There was a surprise, however. Belief in an afterlife actually had a negative effect on work ethic.

The effect of religion was small. Overall, only around 5% of the variation between people in work ethic is explained by religion. But Geser's analysis suggests that it's not due to religious teachings. And the promise of a reward in heaven actually has a negative effect.

Which suggests that the reason religious people have a higher work ethic is that they expect to get a reward for it in this life, rather than the next.

One last thing. The effect of religion, which is small even in poor countries, disappears in rich countries. That's not because the effects at an individual level get less. What happens is that the 'national average' intensity of religious faith has a cultural effect - increasing the work ethic of believers and non-believers.

As countries get richer, their culture shifts from a religious to a secular one. And with that, the idea of working for the sake of work becomes marginalised. In rich countries, people work because they see a reason to do the work.

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Hans Geser (2009). Work Values and Christian Religiosity: An Ambiguous Multidimensional Relationship Journal of Religion and Society, 11 (24)

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Brain patterns of belief

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:23:00 +0000

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief.

Harris and his colleagues were interested in two questions. Firstly, how does the brain process ideas of 'belief' and 'disbelief' - and does it differ when you are talking about religious beliefs or other kinds of beliefs.

Secondly, which bits of the brain evaluate religious beliefs, and do they differ from the evaluation of non-religious beliefs.

It was the usual neuroimaging deal: take some committed believers, and some committed non-believers, and fire some questions at them while scanning them. Broadly speaking, you put the subjects in two different mental states, and then subtract one from the other.

The difference between the two is what shows up in the orange in the picture on the right. Those are the bits of the brain that are more active in one mental state relative to the other.

What they found was that different bits of the brain light up when you evaluate a statement that you believe to be true compared with one that you believe to be false. And it really doesn't matter whether you are a believer or a non-believer, or whether the statement is a religious one or a non-religious one.

What matters is whether you, personally, believe it to be true or false. In other words, there does seem to be anything special about religion here. A believer will evaluate a religious claim that "The God of the Bible is literally true" in the same way that non-believer will evaluate the statement "The biblical god is a myth". And they will both evaluate these in the same way as the statement "Santa Claus does not exist".

But where the study did find a difference was for religious claims in general (whether or not they were believed to be true). That's what the image at the top of this post shows. It's the parts of the brains that light up when processing a religious claim, compared with a non-religious claim.

So what does this prove? Well, part of the problem with these kinds of studies is that it doesn't show much. The brain's a complex, poorly understood organ, and each bit of the brain has been linked to several different functions.

With that caveat, Harris reckons that evaluation of religious statements seem to be linked to emotions of disgust and pain:

The contrast of religious stimuli minus nonreligious stimuli (see Fig. 2A, Table 3.) revealed greater signal in many regions, including the anterior insula and the ventral striatum. The anterior insula has been regularly linked to pain perception [34] and even to the perception of pain in others [35]. This region is also widely believed to mediate negatively valenced feelings like disgust [36], [37].

On the other hand, non-religious statements are linked to regions of the brain connected with memory and semantic evaluation:

The opposite contrast, nonreligious minus religious statements, produced greater signal in left hemisphere networks, including the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, temporal pole, and retrosplenial cortex (see Fig. 2B, Table 4). It is well known that the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus are involved in memory retrieval [42]. The anterior temporal lobe is also engaged by semantic memory tasks [43]

If that's the case, then it would seem to support the idea that non-religious claims are decided by a logical evaluation, whereas religious claims are decided according to whether they disgust you or not.

And a last little titbit. There was also a difference in how quickly the subjects evaluated the statements. The quickest response times were for the non-believers when evaluating religious claims they agreed with (i.e. "The biblical god is a myth"). In general, it's quicker to evaluate a 'true' statement than a false one. Could it be that 'Religion is false' is more true for nonbelievers that 'Religion is true' is for believers?

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Harris S, Kaplan JT, Curiel A, Bookheimer SY, Iacoboni M, & Cohen MS (2009). The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief. PloS one, 4 (10) PMID: 19794914

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How to spot them in the wild: visual characteristics of religious v nonreligious

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:03:00 +0000

There was a study in the New Scientist earlier this year linking what people look like with their personality (I blogged it a few weeks ago). It turned out that it was possible to spot the religious women in the sample from their faces alone.

Now interpreting this was a little tricky, because the non-religious 'typical face' was smiling, and the religious one wasn't. Which suggests that, in the UK at least, you can spot religious people because they don't smile.

But here's a new study, from the US this time, that gives a radically different slant. Laura Naumann (UCB) and colleagues got a group of students and took whole-body (clothed!) photographs, first unposed and then after asking hem to stand in a standard pose.

They also assessed personality by asking the subjects to rate their own personality and also asking them to nominate three friends to rate them. This is the 'gold standard' of personality assessment – because often your friends are a better judge of your personality than you are.

The also asked them whether they were religious, and their political orientation.

Then they asked a second group of students to assess the subjects personality based on photos alone. Basically, individuals are pretty poor at judging personality. In the standardized pose, they were just about able to pick up on extraversion. In the unstandardized pose, there was a hint towards being able to spot the religious.

Things got better when the researchers took a 'wisdom of crowds' approach. This uses a kind of democratic approach, averaging the individual estimates to see what the consensus opinion is. The crowd was able to pick out a religious person just over 60% of the time (you'd expect 50% by chance alone). It was a little bit easier to spot them in the unposed photos, but not much (62% vs 64% - small, but statistically significant).

So, it seems that there is something about how the religious people looked that enabled the raters to pick them out. So the question is, what was that?

Well, the researchers marked all the photos according to several criteria, and rated these against personality. On average, the religious people were more likely to be energetic, relaxed and, importantly, smiling.

Yes, that's right, in this sample of US students, you can pick out the religious because they're smiling. In the UK sample (of New Scientist readers) they were less likely to be smiling.

What's happening here? It could be an age effect, or it could be the different social status of religion in the USA and the UK. To be part of the mainstream in the USA means to be religious, whereas the opposite applies in the UK (for most people in the UK, religion is unimportant, even if they aren't exactly atheists).

In the US, unlike the UK, being non-religious is linked to social exclusion.

It's interesting to compare the characteristics of religious people in the sample with popular people. They're pretty similar. You can see from the graph that, like religious people, people with high self-esteem or who are likeable are more likely to smile and to look energetic and relaxed.

Unlike popular people, though, religious people aren't more likely to look healthy, ordinary, or stand with their arms behind their backs. I'm not too sure what to make of these differences!

Here's another interesting nugget from the study. The first graph show the actual, objective characteristics that are linked to religion and other traits. But their data also let them assess the extent to which their raters used these characteristics as cues.

In other words they could compare what their observers thought characterized religious people, with what actually did. The results are shown in the second graph.

The first thing to note is that the 'What people think' bar tends to be longer than the 'Actual' bar. What this means is that people think it's easier to spot religious people than it actually is.

The other interesting thing is the discrepancies. The raters thought they could pick out the religious people by picking those who were healthy, ordinary and, most especially neat. But in fact the religious people weren't really any of these things.

The curious thing is that the raters didn't expect religious people to look relaxed. Whereas, in fact, looking relaxed was a key attribute of the religious.

So there you have it. They expected religious people to be neat, but in fact they were relaxed! Why should this be? I suspect it's simply because the raters didn't realise that, in their community, religious people are simply the popular people.

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Naumann LP, Vazire S, Rentfrow PJ, & Gosling SD (2009). Personality Judgments Based on Physical Appearance. Personality and social psychology bulletin PMID: 19762717

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Why religious communes succeed and secular ones fail

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Here's an interesting graph. It's from a study comparing religious and secular communes in 19th century USA. Michael was talking about this study in the comments so I thought it would be nice to show the data and talk it through.

It looks at how long each commune lasted, and compares it with the onerous commitments (everything from giving up certain kinds of food, to abstaining from sex, to cutting ties with the outside world) that each commune demanded from its members.

There's two things to notice here. First, the religious communes lasted a lot longer than the secular ones. Second, the more 'costly requirements' imposed, the longer the commune lasted - but only for religious communes, not secular ones.

What's going on here? Well, the idea is that the 'costly requirements' allow potential members to send a signal. If you are prepared to put up with all the arbitrary rules that make your life difficult, then that's good evidence that you really, really want to be part of the group. It's a classic 'costly signal'.

So why doesn't it work for secular communes? Sosis argues that religious rituals are more powerful, because of the supernatural connection (p230):

Thus, it appears that the relative success of religious communes is a result of religious rituals and constraints being imbued with sanctity, whereas the rituals and constraints of secular communes are not consecrated. As Rappaport (1971) stated, “to invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity”

I think that's part of the explanation. A costly commitment has to be justified if people are going to accept it as a price of group membership. For religious communes, it's fairly straightforward. You can argue it's what the god demands - and who can prove otherwise?

For secular communes, there has to be a 'real world' justification. If you are going to ask people to hand over their possessions, you'd better have thought through your rationalization pretty well.

You can see this in Sosis' data. 90% of secular communes have five or fewer costly commitments, whereas half of religious communes have six or more. Secularists simply aren't attracted to this kind of mentality. It's a tough sell.

But I also think there's something else going on here. For people to join a group and stay in it, they have to get something out of it. Crucially, they have to get more out of it than they put in.

For the religious, there's a lot to gain from being in a religious commune. Typically, they might feel that they'll be rewarded by their god in this life or the next. And, arguably, the stricter the group the more rewards they might feel they're going to get.

For the secular, all rewards are solely in the material realm (I don't mean possessions, I mean rewards like being among friends you can trust). And the potential payoff from group membership has to be greater than the costs of membership.

After all, that's the whole point of costly signalling. It acts to screen out people who aren't really committed to the group. For the secular, there just isn't very much point to being a commune member. It's a religious idea, which has been taken up by idealistic secularists only for them to see their vision fail.

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Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. (2003). Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion Cross-Cultural Research, 37 (2), 211-239 DOI: 10.1177/1069397103037002003

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Religion as a costly signal: why the idea is bunk

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 21:40:00 +0000

In the previous post I mentioned the idea of costly signalling. And that's prompted this post, which has been gestating for a while, about the 'costly signalling' explanation for religion. I think the idea is fundamentally flawed, and to explain why I'm going to lean on an essay by Jeff Schloss, who's an evolutionary biologist and ex-member of the Discovery Institute! (You can read more about that bizarre story here).

A costly signal is a cunning evolutionary device, and the classic example is the male peacock's tail. The elaborate tail imposes a cost, but (so the theory goes), it also demonstrates to potential mates the male's genetic fitness. So the guys with the big tails get the girls, and the investment in the tail pays off.

The crucial feature of a costly signal is that it's hard to fake. Keep that in mind...

There is a theory that religious rituals evolved because they're a costly signal. To understand how this works, first you have to accept that religious beliefs encourage people to be honest. (This isn't really backed up by the evidence - the evidence is that environmental primes are effective but not supernatural beliefs in themselves. But anyway...)

So, the theory goes that being altruistic is a potentially a good thing, because people will treat you better. But they can only do that if they can trust you. And that's where costly signalling comes in.

The idea is that all the rituals involved with religion are actually a kind of costly signal. Only people who truly have supernatural beliefs will devote the time and energy to religious rituals, and so you can tell the true believers by their outward show of devotion.

Anybody spot the flaw in that one?

OK, so the obvious problem is that it's a signal that's easy to fake. If going to religious services and pretending to be pious gets you and advantage, then that's what cheats will do.

So, says, Jeff Schloss, we can move up a level. He suggests that deep-seated, involuntary actions are the true costly signals:

Another way—sometimes attending ritual but often contrasted with it—is the widespread, varied, and in many respects distinctive existence of highly visible, involuntary, dramatic manifestations of religious experience: Glossalalia (“speaking in tongues”), convulsive weeping (“veil of tears”), contagious laughing or singing (“holy laughter” or “singing in the spirit”), fainting (“slain in the spirit”), trembling/shaking (“under the power”), religious trances, spontaneous bleeding, etc.

The existence of these ecstatic human behaviors, especially in the religious context, warrants both proximal (neurophysiological) and ultimate (evolutionary) explanation. Unlike involuntary displays such as blushing or piloerection, which merely signal emotional arousal, or vasomotor fainting/epileptic seizures, which are not associated with particular cognitions—these autonomic manifestations are taken to reflect the experience of a very specific (and sublime) reality.

To put it bluntly, when religious people freak out they are giving a hard-to-fake religious signal. The analogy is with smiling - a smile is hard to fake.

Frankly, I'm skeptical. Firstly, these kinds of behaviours are relatively rare, and there's no evidence that people who act like this are regarded as more trustworthy. There's certainly no evidence that they are more trustworthy.

Secondly, smiling might be hard to fake but people who have an incentive can certainly do it. There's no shortage of con men out there who can do it. If you trust people because they 'have an honest smile' then you are a ready-made dupe.

Lastly, and more fundamentally, I think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed because there is no evidence that religious beliefs are linked to altruistic behaviour. Religious priming is, certainly. If you put religious images up, or prompt people with religious messages, then they behave better. But this works with atheists just as well as with the religious. Beliefs have nothing to do with it (Shariff & Norenzayan showed this back in 2007).

What's more, what's more, people tend to justify and rationalize their bad behaviour. Since they also tend to create God in their own image, they can easily co-opt their God into their own rationalizations.

If they can do that, then the whole idea of costly signalling is fatally skewered. If religious beliefs are not linked to altruistic behaviour, then engaging in religious rituals can't possibly be a signal of good intent.

Schloss himself makes this point, and I think I'll leave the last word to him:

It is possible that these highly contagious religious displays are not adaptations for human flourishing at all, but are viral memes parasitizing reward systems that have been selected for other purposes or distorted by various deprivations. Although I have been arguing that this is not the case and that religious affections along with their distinctive manifestations play an important role in promoting cooperative commitment, still, they are notoriously vulnerable to a final, quinternary level of cheating: self-deception. Unlike intentional hypocrisy or consciously manipulative employment of costly signals (Cronk 1994), the best way to fake a hard-to-fake signal is to be sincerely, though inauthentically persuaded of ones own commitment.

Why do atheists have fewer kids?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:24:00 +0000

Here's something interesting from the papers last week. First we've got the philosopher Julian Baggini, an atheist, arguing in The Guardian for the virtues of a childless life. Then, in response, Ed West writes in The Telegraph arguing that atheism is facing a kind of demographic implosion, as the religious inexorably overwhelm them in in the fertility arms race.

Now, this isn't a new argument, but there's precious little research into it. About the only sociologist brave enough to attempt a quantitative prediction is Eric Kaufmann - I blogged about his latest analysis back in June.

But it does give me a handy hook to talk about a chapter in the recent book The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behaviour by Michael Blume - who's done a number of studies into the function of religion from an evolutionary perspective.

First off, some basic stats to give you a feel for what we're talking about here. These are averages across all nations in the World Values Survey, showing the tight light between fertility and religious service attendance.

So is this simply because religions are associated with traditional values? Or maybe that the religious are lower socio-economic status.

It doesn't seem to be so. Blume zooms in to Switzerland, and the data from the census in 2002. Those Jewish and Christian sects that have a higher proportion of the wealthy and educated are actually more fertile than the others.

What's more, traditional sects seem to have lower fertility than the new ones, like Jehova's Witnesses and the New Apostolic Church.

It seems, then, that there is a direct effect of religion on fertility. The question is why that might be so.

From an evolutionary standpoint, it's clear that any trait that increases reproductive success will become more common in the gene pool. Assuming that the demographics we see in the modern translate into the modern world, those genes that favour religion would be more successful.

It's not at all clear to me that we can extrapolate back like that. After all, there's a lot more to reproductive success than churning out children. And modern people have retained a capacity for atheism, which suggests some competing reproductive benefit.

Still, it's worth considering why religion is linked to higher fertility. And it's here that Blume's arguments get really interesting. He suggests that a key factor is honest signalling.

This is the idea that people pay a visible price to get membership of a group, in order to prove that they are committed to the group. The classic example is initiation rites in gang membership.

How does that apply to religion? Well, religions impose a number of obligations on their member - service attendance, food and dress codes, for example. The idea is

There are a number of issues with honest signalling theory as it applies to religion - the jury is still out in the matter (personally, I'm sceptical). But Blume does provide one tantalising piece of evidence.

And that's gender ratios in religious membership. Specifically, the heavy preponderance of women in religious groups, followed next by married men.

The idea is that women have a lot to lose by hooking up with an unfaithful guy. But a male who has made a commitment to the group is sending a signal that he values the group ideals sufficiently to invest the time and effort in going to Church (or whatever). With a bit of luck, that means he's not going to run off with the next available female that crosses his path.

If you want to read that essay yourself, you can download it from Blume's webpage here. It's worth it for the fascinating anecdotes about Darwin and the splendid Faust reference!

Professional obligations versus personal ethics: what doctors think

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:39:00 +0000

In the last post, I reported on a study into whether religious people are more likely to support the Supreme Court to judge matters of right and wrong. Apparently they are. This is in line with the well-known fact that religious people are more likely to have authoritarian natures.

But it doesn't necessarily follow that religious people are more likely to obey authorities if those authorities are religious. There's some good evidence of this from studies of physicians. The most recent has just been published in the journal Academic Medicine.

The study lead was Farr Curlin, from the University of Chicago. Back in 2007 he published a survey which asked US physicians whether they are obliged to refer patients if the patients want a treatment to which they are entitled but which the physician objects to on personal ethical grounds. Abortion is a classic example.

Now, the rules on this are in fact murky. But, as Bernard Dickens, Professor of Health Law and Policy at the University of Toronto, wrote in a paper earlier this year:

The right to conscientious objection is founded on human rights to act according to individuals' religious and other conscience. Domestic and international human rights laws recognize such entitlements. Healthcare providers cannot be discriminated against, for instance in employment, on the basis of their beliefs. They are required, however, to be equally respectful of rights to conscience of patients and potential patients. They cannot invoke their human rights to violate the human rights of others. There are legal limits to conscientious objection. Laws in some jurisdictions unethically abuse religious conscience by granting excessive rights to refuse care. In general, healthcare providers owe duties of care to patients that may conflict with their refusal of care on grounds of conscience. The reconciliation of patients' rights to care and providers' rights of conscientious objection is in the duty of objectors in good faith to refer their patients to reasonably accessible providers who are known not to object.

In other words, if s doctor refuses to provide a service on moral grounds, they have an obligation to refer.

What Curlin found was widespread disagreement with this basic principle among the religious. Nearly half of all physicians with high 'intrinsic religiosity' rejected it, as did 40% of those who went to church twice a month or more. It was rejected by less than 20% of non-religious physicians.

Scroll forward to 2009, and Curlin has done a follow up survey (again in the USA). This time, he specifically asked doctors whether they agreed or disagreed witht he statement "Sometimes physicians have a professional ethical obligation to provide medical services even if they personally believe it would be morally wrong to do so."

The results probably aren't quite what you'd expect.

For Christians versus atheists, there's a clear difference. Christians were more likely to reject the idea that they have a professional obligation to provide services they find immoral.

But Hindus and Muslims were much more open to the idea. In fact they seem more open to the idea of professional obligations trumping personal reservations.

Curlin explains these differences in two ways. Firstly, in cultural terms:

The idea that physicians should never act against conscience follows from a long Western tradition, expressed in the maxim, “Let your conscience be your guide.” This tradition is rooted in part in Catholic moral theology, which says that an individual “must always obey the certain judgment of his conscience. If he were deliberately to act against it, he would condemn himself."

To me, this doesn't seem very likely. The atheists in his survey probably have mostly a 'Christian culture' heritage. And yet they accept professional obligations.

Curlin also found that immigrants are more likely to prioritise their professional obligations, and writes that:

...this finding may indicate that immigrants make a special effort to accommodate and adapt to what they perceive to be the expectations of the host culture.

It would be interesting to do this study in India, to see if the findings are different. But it might explain the atheists responses - as a minority group, they might be more inclined to see the value of having professional rules that apply to everyone.

Alternatively, it might be that the ones who have the biggest problems with the rules are the Christians. After all, the rules tend to allow medical procedures that are anathema to some religious authorities.

Atheists, on the other hand, have no rule book to follow except the commonly agreed standards of the society in which they live.

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Curlin, F., Lawrence, R., Chin, M., & Lantos, J. (2007). Religion, Conscience, and Controversial Clinical Practices New England Journal of Medicine, 356 (6), 593-600 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa065316

Lawrence RE, & Curlin FA (2009). Physicians' beliefs about conscience in medicine: a national survey. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 84 (9), 1276-82 PMID: 19707071

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The intimate connection between religion and authoritarianism

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:16:00 +0000

It's well known that religious people are more likely to be authoritarian than non-religious people. By 'authoritarian' I mean someone who's predisposed to follow the dictates of a strong leader and traditional, conventional values.

But, in a secular society, this leads to a potential for conflict. How do religious people respond if the government authority contradicts religious authority? A new study suggests that it depends on how firm their moral convictions are.

First off, let me just quote from the paper on the difference between religious and moral conviction:

Theories in moral development suggest that people’s religious beliefs are based more on authorities, rules, etc., whereas people’s moral beliefs are comparatively authority independent (Nucci & Turiel, 1978; Turiel, 2002). Consistent with this idea, religious authorities or institutions determine what is permissible or impermissible and at least some of these determinations evaporate in the absence of authority or institutional support.

Conversely, people’s moral imperatives hold even in the absence of authority or institutional support (Nucci & Turiel, 1978). Moreover, belief in God and a general high level of trust in religion load on the same factor structure as general trust in the state and average trust in the government to handle a host of specific issues (Proctor, 2006).

In short, these results suggest that religiosity reflects a generalized willingness to trust authority, regardless of whether the authority is secular or religious.

To look into this further, they looked into data they got from a survey of a cross-section of around 700 Americans. The topic was physician-assisted suicide, and they wanted to know firstly whether panel supported making it legal, and also whether they trusted the Supreme Court to make the right decision. To tease out the effects of the different factors, they used multiple regression.

So what did they find. Well, basically, the more religious the person was, the more likely they were to agree that "I trust the Supreme Court to make the right decision about whether physician-assisted suicide should be allowed." However, people with strong moral convictions were less likely to trust the judgement of the Supreme Court.

They also tested how fast people answered the question. Both strong religious and moral conviction resulted in faster response times. This seems to suggest that the effect here is visceral and emotional, rather than logical and considered.

So much for their conclusions. Personally, I'm a bit dubious. Religious people might trust the Supreme Court to make the right decision simply because they expect the Supreme Court to agree with them.

So this study leaves a lot unanswered. It's clear that religious people do tend to be authoritarian, but it is not at all clear that that translates into obedience to secular authorities in cases of conflict.

In fact, there's some rather interesting evidence from the world of medicine that this is not at all the case! But that's a topic for the next post.

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Wisneski, D., Lytle, B., & Skitka, L. (2009). Gut Reactions: Moral Conviction, Religiosity, and Trust in Authority Psychological Science, 20 (9), 1059-1063 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02406.x

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How normal is WEIRD?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 21:29:00 +0000

It's a shocking fact, but pretty much everything we think we know about human behaviour derives from studies of US undergraduates - the psychologists' 'lab rat'! These people are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) in more ways than one.

A paper from three psychologists at the University of British Columbia lays out in stark detail just how unusual the WEIRDs are, at least from a global perspective. First off, some stats to give you an idea of just how big the problem is. Of studies published in the top psychology journals:

96% of subjects come from Western industrialized countries, which have only 12% of the world's population. And the USA alone accounts for 68% of all study subjects.
99% of the investigators live in these countries, and 73% live in the USA.
67% of US studies, and a staggering 80% of studies in other countries, use a study population comprised solely of psychology undergraduates!

Interestingly, this doesn't simply represent the US lead in science overall. Psychology is simply a much more popular (or well funded) subject in the USA. Whereas 70% of psychology studies come from the USA, only 37% of chemistry studies do.

Does this matter? It sure does!

When studies have been done of people outside the narrow group of WEIRDs, the results are often surprising - and conflict with some cherished theories about evolutionary psychology.

Take, for example, two games that are frequently used to try to understand how people share and co-operate - the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game. Studies done in the West have shown that people don't behave rationally in these games - they're more generous than they should be, and willing to take a hit in order to punish offenders.

Cue all sorts of theories about how we've evolved to operate in groups and, 'for the good of the group' are intuitively more trusting than hard rationality would predict.

But when you do these studies in people living in small-scale societies (foragers, subsistence farmers, and the like), you find that the US is a glaring outlier.

The figure shows how much people offer in the Dictator Game. Both players are totally anonymous strangers. The idea is that you need to offer as little as you think you can get away with without making the other player go off in a huff. In the USA, most players offer rather a lot - nearly 50% of what they have. But in small-scale societies, where dealings with strangers are rare, it tends to be much lower.

What these results suggest is that the pro-sociality shown by US undergraduates is not a consequence of evolution at all. Instead, it's something they learn, as a tool to help them exist in a complex society where you frequently have to interact with strangers.

So what do all these revelations mean for the psychology of religion? A couple of things, I think.

Firstly, the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game are standard tools to test the effects of religion. The idea is that religion - specifically the idea that a supernatural being is watching you - has an important effect in making people more honest.

So, for example, back in 2007 a study showed that religious priming did indeed increase the pro-sociality of Canadian students (whether or not they were religious themselves). But there was no effect in non-students (often older people). This suggests that the students were still learning the rule book for living in their complex world, and that's why religious priming worked.

And the second thing to consider (and this is something that I always wonder about when reading about studies on religion done in the USA) is that the USA is not typical even among Western industrialized nations.

The US is much more religious than other similar countries, and atheists are far more distrusted. What this means is that, in the US, being religious is a badge that shows you are normal and want to fit in. That you are prosocial, in other words.

So we have endless studies from the US showing that prosocial people tend to be religious. As a result, researchers have concluded that religion helps people to be prosocial. Well, maybe. But I'd like to see those studies conducted in a people other than US psychology undergrads before making my mind up!
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Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (in press). The Weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

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A prayer a day to make you grateful

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:30:00 +0000

People who pray more are also often more grateful about, well, stuff. For instance, they're more likely to agree that "I have so much in life to be grateful for" (here's a Gratitude Scale, with six other similar questions).

Here's the thing, though. Is it the prayer that makes people grateful, or is it just that people who are grateful are more likely to pray?

It's a classic problem, and the only way to really sort it out is to do an 'interventional' study. That's one in which you take a group of people, put half on one 'treatment' and the other half on another, and see what happens.

Studies like this are pretty rare in sociology, for practical reasons, but that's exactly what Nathaniel Lambert and colleagues from Florida State University have done.

They took a group of about 100 students, almost all women and all of them in a current romantic relationship, and put them in four different groups. The first two groups were asked to pray daily, and the second two were asked to do a task unrelated to prayer. Here's the details of the groups:

Pray daily for the well-being of your partner
Pray daily (with no specific instructions)
Report daily on their activities for the day
Think positive thoughts about their partner

Then they assessed all the participants for their level of gratitude. It seems (although the paper doesn't spell it out) that there weren't any statistically significant differences.

So they lumped together the two 'prayer' groups and the two other groups. That has the effect of increasing the statistical power.

Doing this comparison, they found a significant difference. Those students who were asked to pray daily did become more grateful.

This is a great study simply because it is interventional. What's more, they controlled for 'social desirability' - the tendency for some people to tell you what they think you want to hear. So it's good evidence of genuine cause and effect. But there are a few problems with it that need to be remembered.

Firstly, they excluded all the non-religious people - in other words all though who said they rarely or never prayed. That amounted to about 25% of potential participants. So this is a study of the effect of prayer in people who already see some benefit to it, but who just don't get around to it as often as they might.

Second, the effect is pretty small - about 1.6 units on a scale that stretches up to 42. The effect might be statistically significant, but that's not the same as saying it's important (Olivier Morin has written about this recently over on ICCI blog). Without the authors putting the results into context of other factors that affect gratitude, it's hard to judge.

And third, the after-the-fact lumping together of groups because they didn't see the result they expected is a little bit dodgy (although much worse goes on regularly, it has to be said).

But despite these caveats, this is a good study. However, it leaves open the question of why prayer should increase gratitude. Mike McCullough, at the University of Miami, put forward some potential reasons in a 2002 paper:

Most religions promote gratitude as a desirable attribute, so people may link religiosity to expressions of gratitude.
Religious people tend to believe in a creator god. So when something good happens (or is seen, like a sunset), they may be more likely to respond with feelings of gratitude.
Lastly, religious people tend to attribute good events, but not bad ones, to the actions of a god. So that may enhance their feelings of gratitude.

To me, generalised gratitude seems like an odd concept. It seems to be tailor-made for the religious mindset. While I have plenty of things to feel glad about, I only have feelings of gratitude towards people.

Religious people are naturally going to extend those feelings towards their god. So I guess we should not be too surprised that making religious people think more about their god also increases their sense of gratitude!

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Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Braithwaite, S., Graham, S., & Beach, S. (2009). Can prayer increase gratitude? Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1 (3), 139-149 DOI: 10.1037/a0016731

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By their faces you will recognize them

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:46:00 +0000

Does this look like a religious woman to you? According to a study by Prof Richard Wiseman in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I've only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of a religious person in the UK.

What they did was to ask readers to send in photos of themselves, along with a rating of their personality. They digitised the key features, and produced an average of each personality type. When other people were asked to guess the personality based on face alone, they were pretty accurate for religious women - 73% got it right.

There was lots of stuff in the article about why this might be (androgens or other genetic linkages, for example), but no mention of one blindingly obvious explanation.

You see, the most striking difference between the 'religious' face and the 'non-religious' one is that the non-religious face is smiling.

In fact, the same goes for all the pairs of female faces that the raters were able to identify correctly. The lucky face and the trustworthy face are both smiling.

The raters couldn't get the male faces right. And sure enough, neither pair of male faces are smiling. It seems that it's the smile that gives the game away. In a letter in the 21 March issue, a reader points this out:

Our brains seem to be hard-wired to interpret smiling positively. Nearly all of your data can be explained by it, yet the experiment does not control for smiles.

Only the paired female images gave positive results, and those were the pairs that exhibited greater differences in their smiles. For example, both composite faces under the "Humorous?" heading are smiling to a similar extent, and there was no difference found between them. In the "Religious?" category, we might suppose that people would consider those who are religious to be more serious, and the image with the smaller smile is indeed chosen by the majority.

Wiseman responds by conceding that smiling might explain 'some' of the results. But points out that religious people are supposed to be happier than the non-religious.

This study doesn't show that you can identify religious people by the shape of their faces. But it does suggest that, in the UK at least, religious people are thought of as unsmiling.

That would explain why the religious people didn't smile. They knew, of course, that the photograph was going to be linked to their personality traits. And that knowledge would undoubtedly change their behaviour.

Interestingly, both religious and non-religious, and the raters, knew the rules of the game. Religious people in the UK aren't supposed to be smiley!

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Why are atheists so disliked?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:48:00 +0000

Bruce Hood has a post up about the atheist bus ad controversy in the US state of Iowa (OK, it was a couple of weeks ago, but I've been away...). What caught my eye was a comment by Konrad:

The thing that got me was the governor of the state saying that he found the ad disturbing. Clearly, people seem to treat religious adherence as symbolic of group identity so that they find the idea of atheists in their midst as threatening as that of enemy spies.

The hostile reaction to what was a pretty innocuous ad certainly is extraordinary. But is group identity - and the distrust of non-group members, really the cause of it?

Some intriguing hints come in a masters thesis by Will Gervais, a student at the University of British Columbia (I took it with me on vacation for some pool-side reading!). In it he describes a series of three experiments in anti-atheist prejudice among fellow students.

The first was an implicit association task. What this found is that religious people have a fairly deep-seated conception of atheists as unpleasant and untrustworthy - but it was the lack of trust that came through strongest.

The second explored the idea of trust further, by exploring how religiosity affects willingness to hire atheists.

It turns out that it depends on the kind of job. Religious people were quite prepared to hire atheists for jobs that don't require require particularly trustworthy people. But they weren't prepared to hire atheists for high trust jobs.

Religious people didn't show this bias when the jobs were split into those that do or do not require pleasant people, or when the jobs were split according to the required degree of intelligence.

These two experiments show that the primary driver for religious hostility to atheists is specifically a lack of trust, rather than a belief that they're more generally unpleasant. But it doesn't explain why they have this level of distrust.

It could be in-group favouritism. Trust is the classic victim of group divisions, and so if the religious see atheists as an alien group then you would expect them to be distrustful.

However, Gervais argues that this might not be the whole story, for several reasons. Firstly, there was no evidence that atheists distrusted the religious, which you would expect if this were a standard case of distrust between groups.

Also, it's not at all clear that 'atheists' are seen to be a group. Although the 'religious' are also highly diverse, by and large they all subscribe to some doctrine that defines them as group members (of one religion or another). Atheists, by definition, have no such common ground that make them an identifiable group.

What's more, open atheists are a tiny minority in North America. Normally, between-group hostility is proportional to the size of the group. The hostility towards atheists seems to be, quite literally, out of all proportion.

It might be that distrust of atheists is driven, or at least augmented, by fears that non-belief in a punishing god will lead atheists to behave dishonestly. That's certainly what a lot of evangelical Christians believe (and cognitive psychologists, for that matter).

But what about the third experiment? Here's where it gets rather interesting. In the third experiment, Gervais gave the subjects one of three passages to read and react to - one on food, an excerpt from The God Delusion in which Dawkins argues that belief is nonsensical, and a passage detailing the increasing numbers of atheists in the USA in recent decades. This last passage included the crucial fact that at least 20% of Americans aged 18-25 are atheists.

For the religious, reading that atheism was rather more common than they previously believed had a remarkable effect. It effectively abolished their distrust of atheists.

To me, this result strongly suggests that distrust of atheists is mostly due to fear of 'others'. It suggests that the main reason for the distrust is that the subjects had not realised that many of their fellow students were, in fact, atheists.

Once they learned that atheists were not a weird, alien group, but rather people just like them, they felt able to trust them. And I think this conclusion is supported by the experience of atheists in places like the UK, where overt atheism is much more prevalent and distrust of atheists is correspondingly lower.

There are two lessons here. First, it suggest that theories that religion evolved as a tool to enforce in-group trust may be wrong.

Second, it suggests that all those bus ads may well be serving a useful function, even if they're unlikely to convert anyone. If they normalise atheism, then they should also help to change the lot of atheists in the USA from social pariahs to trusted community members.

By the way, if you're interested in group cohesion, you might be interested in an earlier post on The Hand Grenade Experiment.

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Is the Social Function of Religion Changing?

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:05:00 +0000

One of the leading theories of why religion is so popular goes by the ominous name of 'Terror Management Theory'. Put simply, this is the idea that people turn to religion to ease their fear of death.

Gareth Morris and Tina McAdie, of Huddersfield University in the UK, set out to test this idea in a group of mostly young people (a mix of Christians, Muslims, and the non-religious) recruited within the University.

The study was simple, but the results were very interesting.

While Christians did indeed have a lower death anxiety than the non-religious, Muslims did not. In fact, their death anxiety was markedly higher than both the other groups.

When the participants were asked to explain why they felt the way they did about death, the reasons for the anxiety of Muslims became clear:

[For Christians] themes of heaven and eternal life are prevalent, whereas for Muslims the afterlife may be something to fear (“I don't know if I have been a good Muslim and so go to heaven or hell”).

In other words, the Christians in this group had low death anxiety because they mostly don't believe in hell!

This focus on heaven, and disbelief in Hell, is very popular among Western Christians today. But it's a fairly recent development. For most of the history of Christianity, the fear of punishment in Hell was an ever-present and vivid theme.

So it seems to me that the major difference between these two groups is not between Islam and Christianity but between traditional religious ideas and modern ones. So the question then is, why the change? How come Christianity in the West is steadily abandoning traditional concepts of Hell?

The function of Hell is to reinforce social order by threatening punishment to wrongdoers who can't be brought to justice by normal societal mechanisms. As a strategy, it's not terribly successful. Medieval Europe is not renowned as an era of peace, justice and harmony.

But perhaps in the absence of more effective social controls, promoting fear of hell is better than nothing. When better social controls are invented – such as in modern Europe – Hell is no longer needed.

If Hell is no longer needed in modern Europe, then Heaven still is. People still die, and our basic, evolved instincts make us all fear of death. The prospect of heaven can reduce that fear – but only if you abandon the inconvenient concept of hell.

As a result, modern Christianity, reacting to market demand, quietly drops the concept of hell, but retains the concept of heaven.

So the 'Terror Management' explanation for religion might be a Western phenomenon, born from the recent innovation which holds that the afterlife offering only rewards, not punishment. In the past, the prospect of meeting their maker probably did not ease people's anxiety.

What about the people with no religion? That's a pretty amorphous group. It's not clear how many of them believed in life after death. Life after death is one of the most common residual beliefs among the nominally religious (presumably because it helps to reduce death anxiety!). So it might be that

But it would be interesting to see what level of death anxiety there is among committed atheists, rather than the non-religious. In theory, atheists should have low death anxiety since, to paraphrase Epicurus, what do you have to fear from non-existence? However, I wonder whether this cognitive rationalisation is enough to overcome the innate psychological instinct!

[I'm currently on vacation in France - this was posted by robots!]

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Morris, G., & McAdie, T. (2009). Are personality, well-being and death anxiety related to religious affiliation? Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 12 (2), 115-120 DOI: 10.1080/13674670802351856

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Well that went well

trees@hbase.com (Tom Rees) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Despite a few wrong turnings, I managed to make it on time to Broadcasting House this afternoon to take part in Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed radio programme. If you missed it (shame on you!), it's up online on BBC iPlayer and as a podcast (the iPlayer version might be restricted to UK residents).

I think it all went very well - at least, I managed to get through my bits without stumbling or going blank. Hopefully some of it made sense too!

One thing I didn't make sufficiently clear is why I chose 'prayer frequency' as the indicator of religiosity. The problem is that many people - especially the educated and well off, with high social status - believe in a distant, impersonal god.

They may find their beliefs important, but it's a very different kind of belief to those who believe in a personal god who intervenes in the world.

As a result, people who believe in an impersonal god don't pray very often. In fact, the evidence from the US (the Baylor Religion Survey) is that people who call themselves atheists pray as often as those who believe in an impersonal god.

So, by measuring prayer, you're measuring a very specific kind of religious belief. Your measuring belief in a god who will not only listen to an individual, but might also take action to help them.

And that's exactly the kind of belief that you might expect people to turn to in difficult times.