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I've done a few posts recently about fertility, so how about the next stage, parenthood? How do non-religious parents differ from religious ones?Here's a study by Bart Duriez, from the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium, which looks into just that. He quizzed over 900 secondary school students in Belgium about thei...r religious attitudes and their parents approaches to parenting. He also asked their parents the same questions.Duriez used a rather nifty measure of religion, specially developed at the Center for Developmental Psychology in Leuven. It separates Christian beliefs along two dimensions: how strong is their belief in the transcendent, and how literal (or fundamentalist) are their beliefs.Their measured four different aspects of parenting style: support, regulation, extrinsic goal promotion (i.e. wealth, popularity, good looks), and conservation goal promotion (i.e. conformity and tradition).So... drum roll... who makes better parents?Well, it turns out there there was no difference between atheists and strong religious believers on the amount of support given to children, how much parental control there was, and whether the parents promoted so-called 'materialist' ideas (extrinsic goals).But there was a strong an consistent difference on conservation goal promotion. Religious parents were more likely to promote conformity and tradition, rather than openness to change. Previous studies have found that a parental focus on goal conservation leads to decreased well-being and increased authoritarianism.You might expect that fundamentalists were more conservative, but this study didn't find that. Biblical literalism was not independently related to conservation goal promotion.It's the the intensity of beliefs, rather than the parents' so-called 'cognitive style', that matters. Where biblical literalism did have an effect was on materialism - fundamentalists were less worldly.Previous studies have found a link between religion and parental control, and Duriez & Co speculate that their failure to find the same may be a statistical aberration. They conclude:... although adolescents of religious parents may be less likely to engage in problem behaviors, this might be accompanied by a rigid and closed-minded functioning.So, who makes better parents? It depends what you mean by 'better'.____________________________________________________________________Duriez, B., Soenens, B., Neyrinck, B., & Vansteenkiste, M. (2009). Is Religiosity Related to Better Parenting?: Disentangling Religiosity From Religious Cognitive Style Journal of Family Issues, 30 (9), 1287-1307 DOI: 10.1177/0192513X09334168 This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons. Read More
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Amidst all this vibrant global piety - atop the vast swelling sea of sacredness - Denmark and Sweden float along like small, content, durable dinghies of secular life, where most people are non religious and don't worship Jesus or Vishnu, don't revere sacred texts, don't pray, and don't give much credence to the essential dogmas of the world's great faiths.
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Research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world.
Here's a brain-scanning study with a difference. Most such tudies try to work out which parts of the brain are activated when people have religious thoughts. This new one looks at whether religious people have more or fewer nerve cells in different parts of their brains.It's by the team lead by Jordan Grafman that publ...ished a study earlier in the year on brain activation. This latest study uses data from the same brain scans.Basically, the deal is that they boiled their subjects' religious beliefs down to four factors:Intimacy of relationship with God, including praying and religious participation.Religiosity of upbringingPragmatism (which covers the sorts of ideas that the non-religious would agree with)Fear of God’s angerThen they looked at the thickness of the cerebral cortex, and measured which bits were thicker (or thinner) in subjects that endorsed each of these beliefs.The idea is that the thicker bits have more neurones, which means that they work harder. If you know what those regions that have more neurones do, then you can start to figure out what religion (and non-religion) actually is, at least in terms of brain processing.The first factor, intimacy with god, was greater in people who had more neurones in an area of the brain that deals with interpersonal relationships.Now, that's interesting stuff because it shows that people who have a prediliction for feeling intimate with God (praying to god, going to church) may essentially be highly social. The God thing is just an extension of that into the supernatural.The other interesting thing to ponder, according to the researchers, is that this same bit of the brain is also associated with mental disorders. People with a lot of neurones in this area are at risk of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and people with few neurones are at risk of schizophrenia.Here's what they conclude from that:We speculate that the range of RMTG volumes can be viewed as a spectrum, in which high RMTG volume is associated with stereotyped and ritualistic behavior, high-normal volume is associated with religious behavior (which, we should note, is by definition ritualistic), low-normal volume is associated with non-religiosity, and pathologically low volume is associated with schizophrenia (in which disorganized behavior and aberrant religiosity, with blurred boundaries between the self and God, may occur).The other interesting factor was number 3 - the 'non-religious' factor. This was associated with a part of the brain involved in switching to different perspectives. That suggests that people who are more able to take different perspectives may take a more skeptical, worldly attitude.Finally, factor 4, fear of god, was associated with fewer neurones in a region associated with empathy and the ability to figure out what's going on in other people's minds. It also helps with using memories to deal with current situations. The researchers suggest that people deficient in this region may fear god essentially because they don't feel confident that they know what god is going to do next.Now, this is all correlational stuff. It doesn't tell us whether people are born this way, or if these regions of the brain expand (or contract) as a result of life experiences.Factor 2, religious upbringing, hit a blank. You could take this to mean that having a religious upbringing does not change your brain in any detectable way. But it might simply be that the bits it changes are the same bits that are associated with religious beliefs.The researchers draw two overall conclusions from this. Firstly, this is more evidence that there is no special bit of the brain for 'religion'. Rather, religion taps into neural pathways that evolved for other reasons:This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say ‘‘by product’’) of social cognition and behavior.Secondly, the type of god a religious person believes in is a consequence of their underlying neural makeup:...the current study suggests that evolution of certain areas that advanced understanding and empathy towards our fellow human beings (such as BA 7, 11 and 21) may, at the same time, have allowed for a relationship with a perceived supernatural agent (God) based on intimacy rather than fear.In other words, it seems that the way a religious person conceives of their god is a reflection of their own ingrained personality.___________________________________________________________________Kapogiannis D, Barbey AK, Su M, Krueger F, & Grafman J (2009). Neuroanatomical variability of religiosity. PloS one, 4 (9) PMID: 19784372 This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons. Read More
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Rabbi Johnathan Sacks has been hitting the headlines recently with his latest warnings on the perils of nonbelief. Michael Blume has dug out the transcript of his speech, so you can get it from the horses mouth.Most of it is the usual stuff... ...
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?__________________________________________________________________________ This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons. Read More
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' 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 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 cause inequality? 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. __________________________________________________________________________ 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. Read More
"...there remains a yawning gap between the material evidence of the archaeological record and the theoretical models of psychologists. Yet there have been some stirrings of interdisciplinary activity, and all agree that the field is experiencing a surge of interest and new evidence, with perhaps the best yet to come."
Friday 11 December, University of Oxford. NSRN was set up in late 2008 as an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers interested in the burgeoning fields of non-religion, secularity and atheism. After a very encouraging first year, its conveners are delighted to announce this one-day conference, exhibiting much of the new and exciting empirical research now being undertaken in these areas.
A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult to repress thoughts of death, and that people might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival.
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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. __________________________________________________________________________ This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons. Read More
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Mini-Epiphenom Low-bandwith version of Epiphenom for mobile/cell phones now available! http://bit.ly/1UJNeG
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Mini-Epiphenom Morality: no gods required - Paula Kirby in NY Times.: From here it is not difficult to see where ideas about post-death retribution sprang from. 4 out of 5 of us feel the need to see wrong-doers pu.. http://bit.ly/2DPiHB
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Epiphenom: Is ritual purification brain down to a brain short circuit?: 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 m.. http://bit.ly/2Cmgcp
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Mini-Epiphenom Review of 'Spirit Level' - a book on income inequality and societal health http://bit.ly/3n8cQ9
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Mini-Epiphenom A Socially Responsible Method of Announcing Statistical Associations - A.C. Thomas, Scientist: So here's a modest proposal: when possible, beat back the causal assumption by presenting an assoc.. http://bit.ly/X0tgI
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Epiphenom: The inheritance of religion: 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 com.. http://bit.ly/v5QBw
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Mini-Epiphenom Animals feel the pain of religious slaughter - New Scientist http://bit.ly/bn5WP
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Epiphenom: The doctors who hasten death: http://bit.ly/5KWLu
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Mini-Epiphenom Does Religion Really Reduce Crime? http://bit.ly/4bhOVQ
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Epiphenom: The Malthusian time bomb: http://bit.ly/258Vn2
Taylor Newton will you be at SSSR in Denver this weekend?
Tomas Rees
Mini-Epiphenom Lying in the name of God - how Christian campaigners engineered a moral panic over prostitution and trafficking | The Guardian: During the following years, the subject attracted the attention of rel.. http://bit.ly/MIrJL
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Epiphenom: Now tweeting: http://bit.ly/1WQFmr
