312 posts · 397,594 views
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- March 23, 2016
- 08:57 PM
- 57 views
Trust is more important than religion in encouraging charitable acts
It’s well established that religious people tend to volunteer more and give more to charity than the non-religious. There are many factors that could contribute to this. Many charities that explicitly to support co-religionists or to promote religion, and what’s more religious people also tend to be older and married, both of which predict But [Read More...]... Read more »
Glanville, J., Paxton, P., & Wang, Y. (2015) Social Capital and Generosity: A Multilevel Analysis. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. DOI: 10.1177/0899764015591366
- March 17, 2016
- 09:41 PM
- 121 views
Dogmatic atheism and fundamentalist Christianity: creating certainty in an uncertain world
Evidence is building up that, because religion helps people to deal with uncertainties of life, it’s particularly attractive to the kind of people who have a hard time dealing with uncertainty. But what about atheists? Some atheists seem rather fixed and absolutist in their beliefs. Perhaps they use atheism as a prop in much the [Read More...]... Read more »
Kossowska, M., Czernatowicz-Kukuczka, A., & Sekerdej, M. (2016) Many faces of dogmatism: Prejudice as a way of protecting certainty against value violators among dogmatic believers and atheists. British Journal of Psychology. DOI: 10.1111/bjop.12186
- March 10, 2016
- 09:20 PM
- 139 views
Use of prayer by African-Americans can help explain why they are more sensitive to pain
African-Americans are more sensitive to pain than Caucasian (white) Americans. That’s been shown in comparisons of much pain is experienced in illnesses such as AIDS and arthritis, after surgery, and in conditions such as lower back pain. It’s also been shown experimentally, when volunteers undergo painful experiences (like holding your hand in ice-cold water) and report [Read More...]... Read more »
Meints, S., Miller, M., & Hirsh, A. (2016) Differences in pain coping between Black and White Americans: A meta-analysis. The Journal of Pain. DOI: 10.1016/j.jpain.2015.12.017
- February 19, 2016
- 03:42 PM
- 226 views
Can atheism increase stock market volatility?
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s a ridiculous idea, so daft it’s probably not even worth spending time thinking about. But stick with me on this because the analysis is a fascinating one. I’m talking about a recent study by Benjamin Blau, a finance expert at Utah State University. He picked up on a [Read More...]... Read more »
Blau, B. (2015) Religiosity and the Volatility of Stock Prices: A Cross-Country Analysis. Journal of Business Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-015-2842-7
- February 12, 2016
- 04:33 PM
- 219 views
Planned Parenthood is disgusting? What does that even mean?
Whatever the ins and outs behind the tragic shootings at Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, it seems safe to assume that the heated and inflammatory rhetoric that has characterised the debate around abortion in the USA has played a major role. A couple of weeks ago, Planned Parenthood innocently asked Twitter users for one word [Read More...]... Read more »
Ritter, R., Preston, J., Salomon, E., & Relihan-Johnson, D. (2015) Imagine no religion: Heretical disgust, anger and the symbolic purity of mind. Cognition and Emotion, 1-19. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1030334
- February 11, 2016
- 03:26 PM
- 247 views
Religion linked to reduced levels of stress hormones in young American Blacks
Compared with Whites, Black Americans have high levels of an important stress hormone called cortisol circulating in their bloodstream. No-one really knows why this is, but the differences remain even after you take into account social and psychological factors. It seems likely that simply being black exposes you to a cumulative effect of increased lifetime [Read More...]... Read more »
Assari, S., Moghani Lankarani, M., Malekahmadi, M., Caldwell, C., & Zimmerman, M. (2015) Baseline Religion Involvement Predicts Subsequent Salivary Cortisol Levels Among Male But not Female Black Youth. International Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, 13(4). DOI: 10.5812/ijem.31790
- February 4, 2016
- 10:06 AM
- 230 views
A sense of mystery results from the brain failing to shut down flights of fancy
People who have a mystical experience might describe it as being “touched by some higher or greater truth or power“, or as “experiences felt or experienced beyond the realms of ordinary consciousness”. Psychologists define them as a breakdown in the usual sense of time or space, or of the difference between the self and the [Read More...]... Read more »
Cristofori, I., Bulbulia, J., Shaver, J., Wilson, M., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2016) Neural correlates of mystical experience. Neuropsychologia, 212-220. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.11.021
- January 11, 2016
- 05:11 PM
- 282 views
Kids in atheist families are more altruistic! The study is sound, but what does it mean?
You may have seen the buzz around a recent study which found that kids in atheist families are more altruistic than kids in religious families. Like any study that reinforces preconceptions of a vocal group, it was social media gold dust. I want to take a critical look at it and some of the objections [Read More...]... Read more »
Decety, J., Cowell, J., Lee, K., Mahasneh, R., Malcolm-Smith, S., Selcuk, B., & Zhou, X. (2015) The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.056
- January 6, 2016
- 05:04 PM
- 402 views
Reminding people of mortality makes them more religious? Not if you use magnets to mess with their brains!
By using a carefully calibrated magnetic field, you can change the patterns of brain activity. It should come as no surprise, then, that you can actually change the intensity of religious beliefs in this way, at least temporarily. For example, a recent study found that activating the brain’s parietal lobe (the bit near the top [Read More...]... Read more »
Holbrook, C., Izuma, K., Deblieck, C., Fessler, D., & Iacoboni, M. (2015) Neuromodulation of Group Prejudice and Religious Belief. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsv107
- December 22, 2015
- 02:21 PM
- 363 views
The God-serving bias: thank God if you live, but don’t blame God if you die
Bad things happen to good people. On the face of this, this causes problems for belief systems that insist on some kind of cosmic karma – the idea that there is a supernatural overseer who metes out punishments to the bad and rewards the good. Theologians turn to several different rationales and justifications to explain [Read More...]... Read more »
Riggio, H., Uhalt, J., & Matthies, B. (2014) Unanswered Prayers: Religiosity and the God-Serving Bias. The Journal of Social Psychology, 154(6), 491-514. DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2014.953024
- December 18, 2015
- 06:12 PM
- 394 views
A world by design – even atheists intuitively think the natural world has a designer
Research over the past few years has shown that many people intuitively think that things in the natural world exist for some ulterior purpose – almost as if they had been designed that way. We have a tendency to agree with statements such as ‘water condenses to moisten the air’, or ‘the sun shines in [Read More...]... Read more »
Järnefelt, E., Canfield, C., & Kelemen, D. (2015) The divided mind of a disbeliever: Intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults. Cognition, 72-88. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.02.005
- December 18, 2015
- 01:11 PM
- 351 views
Whether religious people are more healthy depends upon the social context
One of the accepted truisms of religious research is that religious people tend to be healthier than the non-religious. Over the years I’ve seen many studies looking into this but haven’t blogged about any since 2012 because, well, they’re all a bit boring. One of the problems is that almost all the research is done [Read More...]... Read more »
Stavrova, O. (2015) Religion, Self-Rated Health, and Mortality: Whether Religiosity Delays Death Depends on the Cultural Context. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(8), 911-922. DOI: 10.1177/1948550615593149
- December 3, 2015
- 10:09 AM
- 535 views
Conspiracy theories flourish when people feel like things are slipping out of control
You young ‘uns may not remember the dark days of 1999, when the imminent arrival of the millennium was met with a fair degree of fear and trepidation. And it wasn’t just your usual end-times hysteria. There was actually some real concern that a software bug – the infamous Y2K bug – a could cause [Read More...]... Read more »
van Prooijen, J., & Acker, M. (2015) The Influence of Control on Belief in Conspiracy Theories: Conceptual and Applied Extensions. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 29(5), 753-761. DOI: 10.1002/acp.3161
- November 13, 2015
- 04:24 PM
- 575 views
Make people uncertain then remind them about God, and they become more fearful of sin
There’s plenty of research about suggesting that feeling uncertain can increase the strength of belief in god in different ways. But what’s not clear is whether belief in god reduces the ill effects of uncertainty, or is a response to it. One theory is that a belief in God provides a kind of reassurance, which [Read More...]... Read more »
Fergus, T., & Rowatt, W. (2015) Uncertainty, god, and scrupulosity: Uncertainty salience and priming god concepts interact to cause greater fears of sin. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 93-98. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbtep.2014.09.003
- November 10, 2015
- 05:00 PM
- 450 views
Atheist kids are more altruisitic! The study is sound, but what does it mean?
You may have seen the buzz around a recent study which found that atheist kids are more altruistic than religious kids. Like any study that reinforces preconceptions of a vocal group, it was social media gold dust. I want to take a critical look at it and some of the objections that have been raised [Read More...]... Read more »
Decety, J., Cowell, J., Lee, K., Mahasneh, R., Malcolm-Smith, S., Selcuk, B., & Zhou, X. (2015) The Negative Association between Religiousness and Children’s Altruism across the World. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.056
- November 5, 2015
- 09:47 PM
- 537 views
Your good deeds are pleasing God? That might impress kids but it doesn’t impress adults!
The most magnificent charitable gesture can fall flat if it turns out that you just did it to get a promotion, or get some other kind of pay off. People don’t like it if they think they detect a hidden motive behind apparently charitable behaviour. Last year, research by University of Kentucky psychologist Will Gervais [Read More...]... Read more »
Gervais, W. (2014) Good for God? Religious motivation reduces perceived responsibility for and morality of good deeds. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(4), 1616-1626. DOI: 10.1037/a0036678
Heiphetz, L., Spelke, E., & Young, L. (2015) In the name of God: How children and adults judge agents who act for religious versus secular reasons. Cognition, 134-149. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.07.017
- October 16, 2015
- 11:44 AM
- 430 views
Subliminal religious prompts might not make people nicer after all
Back in 2007, right when I was starting this blog, a ground breaking study revealed an extra-ordinary finding. What the researchers had discovered was that just giving people subliminal reminders of religion was enough to make them be more generous in a something called the dictator game. The really extraordinary thing was that the same [Read More...]... Read more »
Gomes, C., & McCullough, M. (2015) The Effects of Implicit Religious Primes on Dictator Game Allocations: A Preregistered Replication Experiment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. DOI: 10.1037/xge0000027
- October 12, 2015
- 09:51 PM
- 661 views
What do people think God is actually like?
The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes once scathingly pointed out that people imagine god to be pretty much like themselves: But mortals suppose that gods are born, wear their own clothes and have a voice and body. Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are are blue-eyed and red-haired. Christian tend [Read More...]... Read more »
Shtulman, A., & Lindeman, M. (2015) Attributes of God: Conceptual Foundations of a Foundational Belief. Cognitive Science. DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12253
- October 7, 2015
- 12:50 PM
- 494 views
In a just world, how you act depends on who you think delivers justice
Many years ago I worked a couple of seasons as a porter on the now-defunct hovercraft service across the English Channel. One of the old hands used to tell me regularly that “what you lose on the swings, you make up on the roundabouts” – a phrase that’s stuck with me ever since. What he [Read More...]... Read more »
Stroebe, K., Postmes, T., Täuber, S., Stegeman, A., & John, M. (2015) Belief in a Just What? Demystifying Just World Beliefs by Distinguishing Sources of Justice. PLOS ONE, 10(3). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120145
- September 30, 2015
- 09:40 PM
- 608 views
Does more education mean more, or less, religion? It depends whether you take intelligence into account.
It’s pretty well established now that there is a statistical connection between intelligence and non-belief. The effect is small, but it’s consistent and has been shown many times. Education, however, is a different matter. Some studies show that educated people are more religious, while others find they are less religious. Now there’s an obvious problem [Read More...]... Read more »
Ganzach, Y., & Gotlibovski, C. (2014) Individual differences and the effect of education on religiosity. Learning and Individual Differences, 213-217. DOI: 10.1016/j.lindif.2014.10.007
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