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- September 6, 2010
- 05:36 PM
- 508 views
Gender, religion, and volunteering
Here's a quick one on study of volunteering among older people. It's well known that religious people do more formal voluntary work, on average, than the non-religious. What's less well understood is why that should be.
Well, one other thing that's notable about religion in the USA is that it's more popular with women. And women also tend to volunteer more (well, both those 'facts' are more or less true depending on which study you look at).
In this new study, Lydia Manning of Miami University, analysed data from the Health and Retirement Study which, since 1992, has been tracking a group of over 12,000 retired people across the USA.Manning's analysis looked at the original 1992 survey, focusing on the 6,000-odd people who reported doing over 100 hours of voluntary work a year.
What she found was that women were much more likely to be volunteers - 15 times more likely, in fact. Once she took this into account, however, there was no relationship between religiosity and volunteering.
Now, there are a few deficiencies in this study - most notably that religion was only measured as affiliation (are you a Catholic, Protestant or whatever). Previous studies have shown that religious service attendance is, unsurprisingly, a better predictor of volunteering.
But Manning's study does reinforce a general point about these sorts of correctional studies. Religious and non-religious people are different for all sorts of reasons. You have to be very careful before assuming that religion is the cause of any differences you see.
Manning LK (2010). Gender and religious differences associated with volunteering in later life. Journal of women & aging, 22 (2), 125-35 PMID: 20408033
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Manning LK. (2010) Gender and religious differences associated with volunteering in later life. Journal of women , 22(2), 125-35. PMID: 20408033
- September 2, 2010
- 05:51 PM
- 766 views
The difference between being religous and being a believer
One of the big news stories from last year was the revelation that Americans are leaving their churches and religious institutions in droves. They are becoming "unaffiliated", although there was a lot of debate over what that meant. Are Americans losing religion, or is it simply that they are disillusioned with what they're being offered?
A new analysis, using data collected over the last three decades by the General Social Survey, sheds some light on this - and also tells us more about just who is religious in the USA these days. Some of the answers are quite surprising.
First a little bit about how they framed the questions on religion in the General Social Survey - it's not straightforward. First, they asked "what is your religious preference". Those who said "none" were counted as unaffiliated and weren't asked any further questions. Those who gave a religious preference were then asked how often they attended religious services and how strong was their faith.
So the data on strength of faith and religious attendance relate only to the dwindling number of people who are affiliated. That's important to remember.
The new analysis (Kevin Flannelly and colleagues from the Spears Research Institute, New York) confirmed that religious affiliation has dropped off over the years of the survey (since 1972). Now, you might think that this happens because those who are lukewarm in their religion have dropped out. If that were so, then the average 'religious strength' of those left in would go up.
In fact, that hasn't happen. Even those still affiliated to a religious faith go to services less often than they used to. And people still in religion are no more fervent than the religious of 30 years ago.
But there are some interesting differences between the affiliated and the non affiliated. For example, the unaffiliated are, on average, better educated than the affiliated. Yet, among the affiliated, the better-educated actually have stronger faith and go to Church more often.
Perhaps that's because those educated people who remain in religion do so as an active choice.
It works the opposite way around for income. After adjusting for all the other factors, richer people are more likely to be affiliated. However, among the affiliated, wealth means weaker faith.
The last anomaly is children. Previous research suggests that religious people tend to have more children than the non-religious. And, indeed, this new research shows that the unaffiliated have fewer children than the affiliated. But, among the affiliated, those with stronger religious faith actually have fewer children those whose faith is weaker.
Now, the effect is tiny. However, it does suggest something interesting about the connection between religion and fertility. It suggests that families join (or remain in) a religion for the religious congregations - a social structure in which to raise their children - rather any particular religious zeal.
It's the classic demonstration of the difference between being religious and being believer.
Flannelly KJ, Galek K, Kytle J, & Silton NR (2010). Religion in America--1972-2006: religious affiliation, attendance, and strength of faith. Psychological reports, 106 (3), 875-90 PMID: 20712176
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Flannelly KJ, Galek K, Kytle J, & Silton NR. (2010) Religion in America--1972-2006: religious affiliation, attendance, and strength of faith. Psychological reports, 106(3), 875-90. PMID: 20712176
- August 19, 2010
- 05:33 PM
- 855 views
Young evangelicals are greener... but no more liberal
During the last US presidential campaign, there was a flurry of excitement when pundits caught hold of the idea that some young Christian evangelicals might possibly vote for Obama (despite the fact that he is, apparently, a Muslim, or perhaps not even a Christian, or something). This would not be so surprising. After all, there is nothing set in stone about what the political and even moral beliefs of an evangelical should be. There would be nothing in principle to stand in the way of a bit of revisionism.
Well, it turns out that no, young evangelicals are just as likely to vote Republican as their parents. That's according to a new analysis, by Buster Smith and Byron Johnson, of the Baylor Religion Survey (which was conducted back in 2007). That's even more surprising given that non-evangelical youth tend to be more liberal than their parents.
Not only that, but young evangelicals are similar to their old folks on a number of other moral questions - most of them think that abortion is wrong, even in the case of a rape. They're against smoking dope, and also embryonic stem cell reseach. And they have a particular beef about allowing homosexuals to marry.
So much for issues of personal morality. What about broader political issues? Well, here it gets a little more interesting.
Here they found the only significant difference between young and old evangelicals - on green issues. Young evangelicals were more likely to think that the government should spend more to protect the environment. They were also more likely to think that climate change will be disastrous, and that we're going to run out of fossil fuel.
But that's it. The only difference. Young and old thought similarly about government health and welfare spending.
There's a couple of things that fascinate me about this analysis. It doesn't surprise me that views on personal morality are shared between young and old. I guess that means these are a core feature of evangelical identity. If you drop them, then you are no longer part of the gang. Although I don't see the religious link to maijuana use, I can see how religious ideals of purity (homosexuality confuses gender), procreation (abortion reduces fertility), and essentialism (embryonic stem cell research means changing one thing into another) are essential building blocks of evangelism.
Similarly, I can see how green issues could be up for grabs. The Bible doesn't really have a lot to say about anthropogenic climate change, but I'm guessing (I'm no expert here) it does have some bits that talk about looking after your patch.
But the results for health and welfare suggest that these, too, are a core part of the evangelical identity. Why should that be? Why should rejection of state welfare be linked to evangelism? Is this an inheritance of the old (and probably mythical) 'Protestant Work Ethic'?
The second thing that strikes me is that these evangelicals - young and old - actually support more government spending on the environment and health. I suspect that's not a view shared by many non-religious, fiscal conservatives.
Good evidence, all-in-all, of issue bundling. What we are lookgin at is poor, ill educated people who want the government to spend more on their health (if not welfare), but who vote Republican because their religious views on personal morality take priority.
Smith, B., & Johnson, B. (2010). The Liberalization of Young Evangelicals: A Research Note Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (2), 351-360 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01514.x
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Smith, B., & Johnson, B. (2010) The Liberalization of Young Evangelicals: A Research Note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(2), 351-360. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01514.x
- August 17, 2010
- 03:31 PM
- 724 views
Praying and staying together - and away from those infidels
Here's a conundrum for you. In the USA, religious couples report higher satisfaction with their relationship. African-American couples are more religious than white couples. Yet African-American couples report lower relationship satisfaction than White couples. What's going on here?
The answer, according to a recent analysis of the National Survey of Religion and Family Life (NSRFL), is that African-Americans would have even worse relationships if it weren't for their religion.
The graphic shows how different groups map out in terms of average family religious activities - "praying together" - and relationship satisfaction. African-Americans are the most religious, yet report the lowest relationship satisfaction.
Teasing these data apart, the researchers (led Chris Ellison at the University of Texas) conclude that family religious activities have a positive effect, and that African-Americans would have even worse relationships if it wasn't for the fact that they are so religious.
The details are a little bit technical, but basically when they chucked a whole bunch of variables into the model, which took account of differences in education, income, marital status and other things (but not religious activities), they found that African-Americans did not, in fact, have lower relationship satisfaction.
Then they added family religious activities in, and suddenly being African-American was linked to worse relationship quality. They concluded that the higher family religious activities of African-Americans were bumping up their relationship quality. Here's W. Bradford Wilcox, one of the study co-authors:
"Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples. This study shows that religion narrows the racial divide in relationship quality in America," Wilcox said. "The vitality of African-Americans' religious lives gives them an advantage over other Americans when it comes to relationships. This advantage puts them on par with other couples." [Press release] Now, although this is a reasonable conclusion, it is also something of a statistical sleight-of-hand. They didn't actually show a statistical interaction. They're inferring one, which is a bit dangerous. It's also a weak effect - going all the way from 'never' to 'more than once a week' on the religious activities scale would only shift relationship satisfaction by 0.6 points on a 6-point scale. Even with all their variables in the model, they only explain 10% of the variation in satisfaction. And, of course, we don't really know which way cause-and-effect is running.
But think about what it means if they are right. It means that the surest way to relationship satisfaction is to enjoy whatever it is that Whites have apart from education and money - high social status, I guess. But for African-Americans, religion acts as a kind social support to help them deal with their allotted place in society.
The researchers did also show one other effect of religion. When partners shared religious beliefs, they tended to be more satisfied. On the face of it, that's not too surprising. You'd expect partners that shared beliefs and attitudes to have more in common, and so to get on better.
But turn it around, and you can see that couples who belong to different beliefs systems are inherently less likely to be happy together. And the effect is potent - partners whose beliefs are strongly different score 1.3 points lower in relationship satisfaction. They may be a great match in every other way, but those different beliefs about an intangible thing like your choice of god is enough to drag them down.
In other words, what we have here is strong, incontrovertible evidence of the fracturing effects that religious beliefs have on society. But somehow that conclusion didn't seem to make it into the press release!
Ellison, C., Burdette, A., & Bradford Wilcox, W. (2010). The Couple That Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality Among Working-Age Adults Journal of Marriage and Family, 72 (4), 963-975 DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00742.x
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Ellison, C., Burdette, A., & Bradford Wilcox, W. (2010) The Couple That Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality Among Working-Age Adults. Journal of Marriage and Family, 72(4), 963-975. DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-3737.2010.00742.x
- August 12, 2010
- 04:44 PM
- 777 views
Praying for abstinence
Religious people are less likely to drink heavily. However, there's a chicken-and-egg problem here. Is it that turning to god help people stay off the demon drink, or is it that hard-core party animals are less likely to be religious?
These questions crop up a lot in studies of religion, but there are a couple of ways round them. Basically, you can look at what happens over time (does being religious at the start of the year predict alcohol consumption at the end), or you can encourage people to be religious and see what happens to their drinking.
That's what Nathan Lambert, of Florida State University, and colleagues, have done (they've done a couple of similar similar studies in the past). They took a group of students and found that, sure enough, the religious ones were less likely to binge drink. They also showed that religiosity at the start of the semester predicted less binge drinking at the end.
Rather more interesting was that they then did a trial in which they randomized students (all of them religious believers) to two groups. One group was asked to pray every day for their friends and family (they had to pick 5). The other group was asked simply to think positive thoughts daily about their friends and family.
By the end of the study, four weeks later, the 'good thoughts' group were drinking nearly twice as much alcohol as the 'prayer' group.
So it seems that making nominally religious people actively engage in their beliefs can discourage them from drinking. But why?
Lambert has two theories. First is that prayer may help to improve your relationships with others (that's something Lambert has shown in an earlier study). And if relationships are stronger, then you'll have less need to turn to drink to overcome social barriers.
His second theory is that spirituality and alcohol consumption are alternative routes to relieve the 'burden of self'. This is the idea that, particularly in Western cultures, people are under high pressure to succeed as individuals. By turning to prayer, people may have less need to turn to the bottle.
Personally, I think something else is going on here. By making people pray every day, what you are doing is reminding people constantly of their religion. It's called priming. And by doing that, you remind them of their cultural expectations - and also remind them that god is watching them.
In other words, you'd expect daily prayer to encourage people to conform to whatever it is they think their god wants - in this case temperance!
Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Marks, L., & Stillman, T. (2010). Invocations and intoxication: Does prayer decrease alcohol consumption? Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 24 (2), 209-219 DOI: 10.1037/a0018746
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Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Marks, L., & Stillman, T. (2010) Invocations and intoxication: Does prayer decrease alcohol consumption?. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 24(2), 209-219. DOI: 10.1037/a0018746
- August 9, 2010
- 05:25 PM
- 767 views
Why psychotic patients with religious delusions are harder to cure.
We all hold beliefs that are not provable, and defining when these beliefs cross the line and become psychotic delusions is not easy. It's clear that such a line does exist, however: every town has its share of people whose religious beliefs fall sufficiently far outside the conventional that they are declared psychotic.
In popular imagination, at least, psychotic delusions often have a religious component. In reality, many psychotic delusions are not religious. However, many delusions involve hallucinations or mind control by unseen agents, and so it's not too surprising that those who experience them fold them into their religious background. The religious beliefs don't trigger the psychosis, but they become enmeshed within it.
But do religious beliefs help or hinder those with delusions?
Sylvia Mohr, at the University Hosptial of Geneva in Switzerland, took a look at over 200 psychiatric outpatients at two mental health institutions - one in Geneva and the other in Trois-Rivières, Québec. Half of them had frequent psychotic delusions, and 38 (around one in six of the total sample) had delusions with religious content.
She found that religious nature of their delusions did help some patients to cope. For some, who believed they were being persecuted demons, belief in their god or guardian angel gave them comfort and strength to deal with their condition. This is what one patient said:
The auras say "we will catch him" and "we will kill him," and they make me feel external pain. At the beginning, I was hopeless and I believed that the auras were strong and superior. I spoke to the priest about the auras, and he helped me to find the courage to fight. God loves me and comforts me. With the help of God, I am winning against the auras. They cannot hurt me anymore, and they are inferior. I don't speak about this to the psychiatrist, because it is very personal. I do not have a mental disorder, but a physical illness due to the auras, so I take the medication".
For one patient, who believed he was being controlled by supernatural entities, turning to his priest helped them to understand that his delusion was an illness. Others had similar tails to tell.
However for most patients (55%, in fact), the religious component of their delusions actually made their condition more serious. This was especially the case for those suffering from self-delusions - thinking that they are somebody else. The delusion that you are John the Baptist seems to make it harder to cope with your disease than the delusion that you are Napoleon!
Patients with delusions - and especially those with religious delusions - tended also to be more religious than those. And this is where their real problems begin.
For one thing, despite being more religious, patients with religious delusions actually engage in fewer group religious activities and receive less support from their religious communities than do patients with non-religious delusions. That's presumably because their religious communities find these religious delusions particularly disturbing.
These patients also are more likely to find that their religion brings them into conflict with psychiatrists and others who are trying to provide mental health support. In fact, one in four of them have come to believe that their religion does not allow them to take antipsychotic medication.
So religion is a mixed bag when it comes to psychosis. For some, it provides solace. For others, however, it increases the danger that they will sink further into their own delusions - a problem exacerbated by the fact that they are shunned by their religious colleagues.For these patients, their religion is more often a burden than a support.
Mohr, S., Borras, L., Betrisey, C., Pierre-Yves, B., Gilliéron, C., & Huguelet, P. (2010). Delusions with Religious Content in Patients with Psychosis: How They Interact with Spiritual Coping Psychiatry: Interpersonal & Biological Processes, 73 (2), 158-172 DOI: 10.1521/psyc.2010.73.2.158
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Mohr, S., Borras, L., Betrisey, C., Pierre-Yves, B., Gilliéron, C., & Huguelet, P. (2010) Delusions with Religious Content in Patients with Psychosis: How They Interact with Spiritual Coping. Psychiatry: Interpersonal , 73(2), 158-172. DOI: 10.1521/psyc.2010.73.2.158
- August 3, 2010
- 02:25 PM
- 633 views
Why are there more Christian congregations where there is more crime?
Take a middle-American US city – a fairly typical city with the usual mix of rich and poor, downtown and suburban, black and white. Indianapolis, let’s say. Which areas do you think would have the highest levels of crime?
Well, the poor areas of course. No surprises there. Downtown areas and those area with low population density are also at risk – probably a result of increased opportunities. Racially mixed areas have higher level of theft and burglary, although not violent crime. And there also seems to be a strong ‘cultural’ effect. There are pockets of high crime that persist even after taking into account all the other factors.
And, last but not least, you also get more crime in neighbourhoods that have more Christian congregations.
Now, the effect isn’t across the board. Catholic and non-Protestant congregations are not related, either positively or negatively, to crime levels. And although Black Protestant and mainline Protestant congregations tend to be located in areas of high commercial burglary (and larceny, in the case of mainline Protestants), they aren’t associated with other types of criminal behaviour.
It’s evangelical Protestants (aka ‘fundamentalists’) that show the strongest connection. Those areas of Indianapolis with more evangelical Protestant churches also have more robbery, aggravated assault, vehicle theft, commercial burglary and larceny. Blimey.
This is just a statistical association. So it could simply be that these churches set up shop in those areas with highest need – with the highest crime rates. But remember that this association remains even after controlling for all those factors I mentioned above. These churches are located in areas that have more crime than you would expect, given the level of deprivation and other factors that predispose to crime.
It could be that these evangelical churches actually increase crime rates as a direct result of their teachings. Often these churches extol the virtues of defensive and punitive violence, and Manichean (i.e. dualistic, ‘heaven and hell’ religious concepts) have been linked to more violent societies. But evangelical churches were no associated with more homicide in this study (although they were linked to more aggravated assault).
The researchers (led by Scott Desmond at Purdue University in Indiana) think that it has something to do with the relative newness of Conservative congregations. In particular, it might be that many people commute to these congregations, rather than living locally. The normal social networks that help forge society are undermined when people travel to meet people over long distances, rather than getting to know their neighbours.
There is, however, one final possibility suggessted by the researchers. In the US, churches are a fundamental of social fabric. But the evangelical churches are highly polarising. Could it be that having one arrive in the middle of your neighbourhood actually leads to suspicion, resentment and even hostility?
If that were so, then more evangelical churches could actually have a destructive effect on local society.
PS. I'm currently away, but will catch up on comments and emails when I get back!
Desmond, S., Kikuchi, G., & Morgan, K. (2010). Congregations and Crime: Is the Spatial Distribution of Congregations Associated with Neighborhood Crime Rates? Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (1), 37-55 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01491.x
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Desmond, S., Kikuchi, G., & Morgan, K. (2010) Congregations and Crime: Is the Spatial Distribution of Congregations Associated with Neighborhood Crime Rates?. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 37-55. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01491.x
- July 17, 2010
- 05:41 PM
- 830 views
How are British kids doing these days?
British society, like that of most industrialized nations, has gone through enormous changes in recent decades. But it's hard to get objective data on what the impact has been on the people living there.
Which is why I was interested to see a recent study by Stephen Collishaw, of Cardiff University, and colleagues. They compared data from two studies, one in 1986 and one in 2006, that asked adolescents (aged 16-17) about their state of mind. Whether they felt anxious, depressed, worried, irritable, had disturbed sleep - things like that.
They found that kids in 2006 were more likely to report emotional problems than those in 1986. In particular, both boys and girls were more likely to say that they felt irritable, had disturbed sleep, and felt worn out or under strain. Their parents, too, were more likely to report similar problems.
Overall, the percentage saying they were frequently anxious or depressed has roughly doubled since 1986.
It's possible, of course, that kids today are simply more open about talking about admitting their feelings. That could be the case, although the authors point out that they did not see a general increase in all emotional problems. Instead, they found that some problems (irritable, disturbed sleep, worn out) increased, while others did not.
So, assuming that this is a real effect, what could be causing it? To investige, they looked at kids living with single parents compared with those living with step parents with step parents (see figure). They also looked at kids from disadvantaged homes compared with advantaged homes.
They found no consistent differences. The increase in emotional problems seems to be roughly the same across all social backgrounds. If anything, the greatest increase seems to be among girls with both natural parents and advantaged backgrounds.
Why could this be? It's very hard to say. Potentially, the higher levels of uncertainty of modern life, coupled with more fractured social networks. But this is just speculation.
What can be said is that while life has not got any harder for the children of divorced parents, it doesn't seem, on this evidence at least, to have got much easier - and that has got to be troubling, given the increasing numbers of children living in homes without both natural parents.
Collishaw, S., Maughan, B., Natarajan, L., & Pickles, A. (2010). Trends in adolescent emotional problems in England: a comparison of two national cohorts twenty years apart Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51 (8), 885-894 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02252.x
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Collishaw, S., Maughan, B., Natarajan, L., & Pickles, A. (2010) Trends in adolescent emotional problems in England: a comparison of two national cohorts twenty years apart. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(8), 885-894. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02252.x
- July 13, 2010
- 05:06 PM
- 784 views
Xanax redux
There's a little corner of your brain - the anterior cingulate cortex - that's thought to play a role in monitoring errors. The electrical signals that flow from this part of the brain ramp up when the mind is challenged with conflicting information, an effect called 'error response negativity', or ERN. In short, ERN represents that anxious, uneasy feeling you sometimes get when you've made a mistake.
Back in 2009 Michael Inzlicht, at the University of Toronto in Canada, found that religious people had lower ERN compared to non-religious people when trying to complete a challenging task. Religion seemed to be acting as a kind of anxiolytic, a bit like the drug Xanax.
But is it religion, or religious people? Perhaps people who are attracted to religion are just naturally more chilled. Or can you actually reduce anxiety by infusing religious thoughts. In his latest study, he aimed to find out.
He took a bunch of students of varying religious beliefs, and subliminally primed some of them with religious thoughts by making them unscramble sentences with religious content. Others had to unscramble neutral sentences.
Then he got them to do the Stroop Colour Word Test, a challenging test that generates ERN.
Both the religious and non-religious performed equally well. And, unlike Inzlicht's first study, there was no intrinsic difference between the two group's ERN after the neutral prime.
However, for those students that were religious, priming with religious thoughts beforehand reduced their ERN. For atheists, the opposite occurred. Their ERN actually increased if they had been previously exposed to religious messages.
It's not clear why this should be. Perhaps religion makes the religious feel comfortable, while for atheists it sets up an immediate conflict, so heightening their response. Maybe priming with reassuring thoughts about atheism would have the opposite effect:
"Maybe when atheists think about science, and the way our world is organized through that lens, it would offer them the same reassurance," suggests Inzlicht. "The point here is the power of the mind to change external circumstances." Vancouver Sun
It's also worth thinking about the implications of this study. On the face of it, reducing anxiety sounds like a good thing. But, like the sensation of pain, ERN is there for a reason. It's there to tell us when we are going down a blind alley, and to motivate us to stop. A low ERN is linked to pathologies such as autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, and attention-deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD).
In this light, it's interesting to compare these results with another study earlier this year. This study found that priming with religious thoughts made people work longer to try to complete an impossible task - when the sensible thing to do was to abandon it as a lost cause. What's more, people primed with religion were actually more anxious afterwards, not less!
Michael Inzlicht, & Alexa M. Tullett (2010). Reflecting on God: Religious Primes Can Reduce Neurophysiological Response to Errors Psychological Science : 10.1177/0956797610375451
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Michael Inzlicht, & Alexa M. Tullett. (2010) Reflecting on God: Religious Primes Can Reduce Neurophysiological Response to Errors. Psychological Science. info:/10.1177/0956797610375451
- July 10, 2010
- 05:14 PM
- 1,069 views
Forget your worries with religious zealotry
When animals are made to feel anxious and frustrated, they often turn to displacement activities - goals which may be irrelevant, but which they can at least achieve. Rats may run so eagerly on wheel that they starve themselves to death. Dogs may lick themselves so repetitively that they develop skin lesions. But what do humans do?
One thing we can do, according to new research by Ian McGregor and colleagues at York University, Toronto, Canada, is to become more fervent in our pursuit of cherished ideals. When people are frustrated in their attempts to achieve concrete, real-world goals, abstract ideologies provide a readily achievable displacement goal.
To test this theory, they ran a series of studies on undergrads. Basically, the setup was to make them anxious about failure, either by asking them to complete an impossible task or to recount a troubled relationship they had. Then they measured various religious attitudes, including religious zealotry.
You can see an example of what happened in the figure. In this particular study they asked participants to think of a goal they had in their personal lives, and then to rate how determined they were to achieve it, how in control they felt, and how important it was. The ones who rated highly were considered to be 'empowered'.
It turns out that that the empowered people did not change in zealotry when placed in a anxiety-inducing situation, whereas the unempowered people became much more zealous. Now, this wasn't because the empowered people felt less anxious. In fact, they felt more anxious. But they didn't turn to religion as a displacement.
In other studies, they also found that people did not become more superstitious in general. What's more, the effect was strongest in people who thought of uncertainty as nerve racking and, intriguingly, in those spirited individuals who believe in taking action to deal with problems.
They also found hints that this effect is stronger in those who believe in the three monotheisms, rather than Eastern religions (or atheists, of course), and suggest that this might be why religious extremism is more common in the West:
In Western religion, the allure of ideological zeal may be that it can reliably activate the resilience of transcendent approach motivation when temporal goals are frustrated. Unfortunately, religious extremists in the West have a long history of blood on their hands. The same empowering approach motivation that makes one soar may also obscure one’s view of others’ perspectives and facilitate ideological cruelty in the guise of noble cause. Such self-empowered, anger-related, and risk-immune RAM processes, in combination with scripture that advocates aggression toward others, may inflame religious violence in the West.Now, this research is pretty preliminary. Other research has found that anxiety and uncertainly increases belief in a controlling God - but this study found no such effect. Of course, it's possible that both effects (handing over control to a powerful God, or displacing the frustrated goal with an achievable, nontangible one) could both occur in different in people with personalities and in different situations. Then too, there is another theory (Terror Management), which claims that people cling to their 'in-group' cultural traditions when threatened.
But this research is encouraging because, although we've long known intuitively that people turn to religion when they feel stressed and unhappy. The question is how and why. Now, at least, we have three good theories about what is going on here. Only further research is going to tease them apart!
McGregor I, Nash K, & Prentice M (2010). Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 99 (1), 148-61 PMID: 20565192
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McGregor I, Nash K, & Prentice M. (2010) Reactive approach motivation (RAM) for religion. Journal of personality and social psychology, 99(1), 148-61. PMID: 20565192
- July 7, 2010
- 01:12 PM
- 681 views
What values motivate the non-religious in the UK?
Most research on religion is done in the US, a country which is something of an outlier among modernised nations because of the importance of religion in daily life. So, for example, the non-religious in the US tend to be 'disagreeable' (meaning that they are nonconformist and prefer to go their own way). But is this something general about the non-religious, or does it simply tell us something about what it takes to be openly non-religious in the USA?
So a recent analysis of the values of the religious and the non-religious in the UK is particularly interesting. The UK is moderately godless - few people go to Church, and a substantial minority (30-40%) don't believe in God.
The researchers sent surveys to 2,000 people in two towns in the south east of England (Woking and Guildford, to be precise) and got 260 back. So it's not exactly a random sample! They asked people about their values, using a standard scale (the Schwartz Value Scale) which splits values into nine broad categories.
You can see their main findings in the figure. Basically, the peaks relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the religious. The troughs relate to values that are endorsed more strongly by the non-religious.
These are the values held dear by the non-religious in the UK:
Universalism: Understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature.
Achievement: Personal success through demonstrating competence according to social standards.
Hedonism: Pleasure and sensual gratification for oneself.
Stimulation: Excitement, novelty and challenge in life.
Self-direction: Independent thought and action - choosing, creating, exploring.
By contrast, these values are held dear by the religious:
Benevolence: Preservation and enhancement of the welfare of people with whom one is in frequent personal contact.
Conformity-tradition: Restraint of actions likely to upset or harm others or violate social norms. Respect, commitment, and acceptance of the customs and ideas that traditional culture or religion provide.
And there are two values for which the relationship changes according to how religion is defined - higher for 'religiousness' and 'attendance' than for 'spirituality' or 'identification'. These are:
Security: Safety, harmony, and stability of society, or relationships, and of self.
Power: Social status and prestige, control or dominance over people and resources.
All in all, I don't there are any major surprises. The religious are relatively more focused on their immediate friends, as well as respect for tradition and conformity. The non-religious, in contrast, tend to be those with the widest horizons and the most independent, confident spirits!
Pepper, M., Jackson, T., & Uzzell, D. (2010). A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (1), 127-146 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01496.x
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Pepper, M., Jackson, T., & Uzzell, D. (2010) A Study of Multidimensional Religion Constructs and Values in the United Kingdom. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(1), 127-146. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2009.01496.x
- June 27, 2010
- 04:30 PM
- 953 views
If you ostracise them, will they come?
Humans, like all other primates, are obsessed by their peer group of colleagues and acquaintances. And that's for good reason because, for primates, being excluded from the group can be lethal.
So what do you do if you find yourself being ostracised? Well, for humans at least, one option is to turn to religion. Religion, after all, provides a ready-made community for those who conform to the group ideology – and even for those who don't, religion offers a virtual world of supernatural buddies.
A series of studies by Nilüfer Aydin (University of Munich in Germany) and colleagues has tested this idea, and given some sense of it's power. Here's what they found.
First they found that migrant Turks living in Germany feel more excluded than Turks living in Turkey, even when matched for age and wealth. They were also more religious and, what's more, the more excluded they felt the more religious they were.
In the second study they took a group of Christians and asked some of them to write about a time when they had felt excluded. Sure enough, they later reported being more religious than those Christians who had been asked to write about a time when they had felt accepted.
In another, similar study they found that Christians who wrote about being excluded were more likely to approve of a whole bunch of religious behaviour, like talking to God and meeting other religious people. A fourth study found that these effects seem to be linked to social discomfort, rather than any effect on self esteem.
The final study was rather more subtle.
One group of Christians were asked to write about being excluded at work, while another group was asked to write about being accepted. Some were then asked to write about religion (they were 'primed' with religion). Then, it what was apparently an unrelated task, they were asked to help out with another study.
They were told that, in this mythical study was, people were to be subjected to the ice-water test. In this test, participants are asked to plunge their hand into freezing water – anything longer than about 30 seconds of this causes extreme pain. The Christians were told that this time needed to be set by an independent party, and were asked how long it should be.
The graph shows the results. Those Christians who wrote about being included suggested a non-pain inducing time of 30s. But those Christians who wrote about being excluded seemed to be venting their frustrations on the anonymous stranger by recommending an agonizing time of 70s for the ice-water test.
If, however, they had previously been primed with religious thoughts, this aggressive drive disappeared. Religion, for these Christians, might be working as an effective buffer to reduce the stress caused by social exclusion.
Now none of these studies is perfect. In the first, it simply be could be that more religious Turks feel excluded in Germany (although that wouldn't explain why Turks in Germany are more religious in general). And studies 2 to 4 were pretty artificial set ups. And the other studies didn't actually ostracise people, only got them to write about it - which is the weakest kind of experimental set up.
As for study four, an alternative explanation might be that the religious prime didn't make people less stressed, but rather made them behave better even in the face of stress. Other studies have shown that priming people with religious (an non-religious) concepts can make them change their behaviour to conform to social expectations.
But for me the bigger question is whether you can get these effects simply from religious beliefs, or whether (as I suspect) it's the thought that participation in religion that relieves the stress of feeling excluded.
That's critical because traditional society has religion at it's core. It may be that people turn to religion when ostracised simply because that's the easiest way to get re-accepted by the group
But many societies are giving up religion, but without necessarily finding a replacement for the social cohesion that religion has been central to in the past. What will fulfil this function in the future?
Aydin, N., Fischer, P., & Frey, D. (2010). Turning to God in the Face of Ostracism: Effects of Social Exclusion on Religiousness Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (6), 742-753 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210367491
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Aydin, N., Fischer, P., & Frey, D. (2010) Turning to God in the Face of Ostracism: Effects of Social Exclusion on Religiousness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(6), 742-753. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210367491
- June 9, 2010
- 05:41 PM
- 843 views
Religion and the case of the disappearing right-brain
Studies of brain damage give a unique insight into how the mind works. If your behaviour changes when a specific lump is taken out, then that's pretty good evidence for the function of that particular lump.
So what happens when half your brain starts to rot away? Dennis Chan, a neurologist at the Institute of Neurology in London, decided to find out.
'Right temporal lobe atrophy' is a rare condition in which a major part of the right side of the brain simply withers away. You can see a particularly severe case in the picture (the right side of the brain is on the left...). Chan and colleagues compared twenty of these patients with twenty patients whose left-hand side of the brain was withered.
As you might expect, all these people had some serious psychological problems. But, for people with left-brain atrophy, the problems are obvious. That's because this side of the brain controls speech and (for most people) the dominant hand. You can pretty readily spot somebody with left-brain atrophy.
Right brain atrophy is altogether more subtle, and also weirder. These patients get lost easily. They find it difficult to recognise faces, and they have a variety of behavioural disorders, including disinhibition and obsessions. One patient insisted on having all the light switches in her house painted gold and silver!
And, interestingly, three patients were 'hyper-religious'.
Now, they don't describe what they mean by this term, and three patients (15%) might not sound like a lot. But none of the patients with left-brain atrophy were hyper-religious. Two patients also had 'complex visual hallucinations of inanimate objects' and two had sensory crossover, in which stimulation of one sense was experienced as a different sense.
Damage to the right brain - albeit the parietal lobes rather than the temporal lobes - has been linked to religiosity previously. Brick Johnstone and Bret Glass found that people with damage in this region were more spiritual, and Cosimo Urgesi and colleagues have found that tumours in this part of the brain also increases religiosity.
That's perhaps because the right hand side of the brain tends to play an important role in spatial awareness.
However, for the sake of the statistical purists who sometimes drop by I should point out that correlation is not causation. Although it seems likely that brain atrophy leads to religion, you can't rule out the possibility of the reverse!
Chan, D., Anderson, V., Pijnenburg, Y., Whitwell, J., Barnes, J., Scahill, R., Stevens, J., Barkhof, F., Scheltens, P., Rossor, M., & Fox, N. (2009). The clinical profile of right temporal lobe atrophy Brain, 132 (5), 1287-1298 DOI: 10.1093/brain/awp037
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Chan, D., Anderson, V., Pijnenburg, Y., Whitwell, J., Barnes, J., Scahill, R., Stevens, J., Barkhof, F., Scheltens, P., Rossor, M.... (2009) The clinical profile of right temporal lobe atrophy. Brain, 132(5), 1287-1298. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awp037
- June 6, 2010
- 05:26 PM
- 886 views
What did your mommy and daddy believe?
Young adults in the USA are more likely than ever before to tell pollsters that they don't see themselves as 'being' of any particular religion - they are unaffiliated. The data are clear, but the reason for this shift is not.
It might simply be their age. Maybe they will be more likely to identify with a religion when they're older. Alternatively, there could be an uptick in the numbers of people who are leaving religion - for good.
Or maybe it's a snowball effect. More than ever before, American kids are being raised in families that are not affiliated to any religion - you can see that in the graph, which shows how the percentage of kids raised in families with no religion has increased over the years. These kids don't tend to join a religion, so you can add them to the kids who drop out in each generation.
It's actually pretty difficult to untangle the statistics to work out what's going on here. Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska, has used a couple of newly developed statistical techniques to try to do just that, using data from the General Social Survey (which has been surveying Americans since the early 1970s).
What he found was that all three effects seem to play a role. He found that, across all generations since around 1990, there has been a sharp increase in the numbers of people reporting that they have no religious affiliation.
But, surprisingly, younger generations aren't more likely to drop out of religion than they were before. In fact, people born to a religious family in the 60s and 70s are no more likely to switch out of religion than were people born before 1945.
Not so for people born in the period 1945-1960. They are more likely than older generations to switch out of religion. Clearly, growing up in the Hippy generation had its effects!
About one quarter of the increase in non-affiliated young adults can be explained simply by the fact that more and more American kids are being raised in non-affiliated families. This is the snowball effect. When the Hippy generation grew up, they passed on their lack of affiliation to their kids - who were joined by other people who are continuing dropped out of religion at the normal, background rate.
The big question now is what will happen to these young non-affiliated. Based on earlier generations, you might expect a fair number of them to rejoin a religious identity as they age. But will this happen to the Millennial generation? Time will tell!
Schwadel, P. (2010). Period and Cohort Effects on Religious Nonaffiliation and Religious Disaffiliation: A Research Note Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49 (2), 311-319 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01511.x
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Schwadel, P. (2010) Period and Cohort Effects on Religious Nonaffiliation and Religious Disaffiliation: A Research Note. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 49(2), 311-319. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2010.01511.x
- June 3, 2010
- 05:05 PM
- 1,772 views
Children can tell the difference between science and religion
Paul Harris, a psychologist at Harvard University, is interested in how children learn to differentiate between different kinds of knowledge. In his latest study, he's teamed up with two Spanish psychologists to unpick the beliefs of young, Catholic children.
These 10-12 year olds have a pretty firm conviction in both God and the soul. They also believe (slightly more strongly, in fact) in invisible scientific entities, like oxygen and germs. What the team wanted to know was whether they believed in these things for the same reasons.
So they asked them how they know these entities exist. The replies were revealing.
The reasons the children gave were broken down into 4 categories:
They had encountered the entity
There was a written source or other authority that asserted the entity existed
There was some feature of the entity that explained its existence in generalized terms (e.g. "Souls exist because everyone has their own way of being", or "Germs are on the dirty things")
The existence of the entity is required because it fulfils some need or purpose (e.g. "God exists because he tells us the way).
The figure shows how often children gave each of these kinds of answers to justify the existence of religious and scientific entities.
Several different reasons were given for their belief in religious entities. For scientific entities, however, their reasoning was almost entirely based on the generalized properties or nature of the entity.
In fact, it's even more interesting than that. Because the researchers also broke these 'properties' arguments down further, into whether or not they were causal explanations - "germs cause disease", or "God has created all of us".
For religious entities, only 17% of the already relatively few explanations under this category were causal. For scientific entities, it was very nearly 100%.
In other words, these young Spanish kids almost exclusively rationalise their belief in scientific entities in causal terms. There religious beliefs, on the other hand, were justified in a variety of ways that were almost never causal.
Guerrero, S., Enesco, I., & Harris, P. (2010). Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10 (1), 123-151 DOI: 10.1163/156853710X497202
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Guerrero, S., Enesco, I., & Harris, P. (2010) Oxygen and the Soul: Children's Conception of Invisible Entities. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10(1), 123-151. DOI: 10.1163/156853710X497202
- May 31, 2010
- 05:36 PM
- 807 views
Did fornicating Farm Girls boost the rise of atheism in Britain?
These days, Britain is one of the most atheistic countries around. It wasn't always like that, of course, but one of the problems with trying to work out how the present state of affairs came about is that there are very few statistics on religion the stretch back far enough.
Stepping into the breach is Steven Bruce and Tony Glendinning, of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. They've put together a time-series from data collected by the Methodists Churches, who have been among the most rigorous in collecting data on their membership.
If you look at the raw numbers, it looks at first sight as though Methodist membership help up quite well - at least until recent decades. But over that same period of time, the total population of the UK nearly trebled.
When you plot membership as a percentage of the total population, a different picture emerges. Methodist membership has actually been declining since records began, with the decline accelerating in the post-war period decades.
Broadly similar patterns (with a few hiccups) can be seen in many other measures of religion in the UK (although inevitably more murky because the data or more patchy). Overall church membership peaked around 1904, Sunday School enrolment peaked in the same decade, and baptisms peaked around 1930.
What caused this decline? Well, membership goes down when the churches lose members - either to death or defection - faster than they can recruit. And the evidence suggests that the major reason for the decline is failure to bind children into the religion of their parents.
This really kicked off during the Second World War. Here's another graph, showing some data for Scotland. There was a sudden surge in the numbers of people who stopped attending, which started during the war and persisted after it. This was mostly due to people who went to church as children, but who stopped attending before they turned 21.
The Second World War caused an enormous upheaval in European society, and trying to trace any one factor as the cause of the rise in godlessness is problematic. However, one clue is that a major reason for young adults to abandon Christianity is having parents from different denominations.
In other words, its much more difficult to pass on religion to your children if parents have different views - even if those differences are as minor as the differences between Anglicans and Methodists.
Now, add to this the fact that the War brought a revolution in the social mobility of women. Young women broke free from their traditional roles, and by 1943 90% of single women aged 18-40 were employed either in the armed forces or in industry.
Many women found themselves posted to areas of the country far from home, often with others - both men and women - of very different social backgrounds. And with that came not only a broadened outlook but also sexual emancipation. On 'Land Girl' working in Romney Marsh recalled:
There were troops everywhere. You could just take your pick. You didn’t know how many were married; you just had to take their word for it. . . . I had several boyfriends during the war. . . . It was a case of a broken heart one night and the next night a new boyfriend’
One result of this freedom was that women born between 1914-1924 were twice as likely to have had sex before marriage than women born 10 years before. But, perhaps more importantly, both men and women were exposed to perspectives on the world that they would never have gained previously.
According to Bruce & Glendinning, the war war weakened the community ties that help the successful transmission of any shared cultural characteristic:
With vast numbers of young men in the armed forces being moved around the country, one way or another, almost all single British women between 1939 and 1945 experienced an unprecedented degree of social mixing. A large part of the eligible population had a chance to engage in pleasant and positive social interaction with people from very different social, regional, cultural and religious backgrounds (Harris 2000: 113). Not all such mixing resulted in a broadening of horizons and a weakening of previous loyalties. The aliens – inner-city evacuees, servicemen, foreigners – could be handy scapegoats for those who saw no benefit from the disruption of old ways of life but for many of those whose children were to form the missing generation of church members in the 1960s, the war was a liberating experience.
As a result, women were less likely to marry the local lad from the same street and church. And it's the mixing together of different world views and perspectives that is fatal for the successful transmission of religion.
Bruce, S, & Glendinning, T (2010). When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause. The British Journal of Sociology, 61 (1), 107-126
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Bruce, S, & Glendinning, T. (2010) When was secularization? Dating the decline of the British churches and locating its cause. The British Journal of Sociology, 61(1), 107-126. info:/
- May 28, 2010
- 05:46 PM
- 776 views
Protestants tempt fate, but atheists don't!
Apparently, some people think that talking or merely thinking about an event can actually bring it about. To me, that's incomprehensible. When I was young, I assumed that the concept of "tempting fate' was a poetic metaphor. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that some people take it literally!
Jonathan Abramowitz and colleagues, at the University of North Carolina, have done a nice little study into the differences between Protestants and nonbelievers in attitudes towards tempting fate. Technically, this is actually 'thought-action fusion' - a cognitive bias that occurs when people believe that thinking is equivalent to doing, and that thinking can make certain events more probable. It's related to obsessive-compulsive disorder.
What they did is to sit people down and ask them to think about a close relative. Then they were presented with two sentences which they had to copy, inserting the name of said relative:
"I hope has a car accident today"
"I hope I have sex with "
Then they were asked about how the task made them feel, was the thought morally wrong, did it make them anxious, and did they think the event was more likely to happen as a result? All this was rated on a 1-100 scale.
The Protestants thought the sex thing was very wrong (giving it 98), the nonbelievers less so (only 81). But neither group thought it was going to happen, even though the thought had been seeded.
For the car accident, things were different. Here the Protestants felt twice as strongly that merely thinking about it made it more likely to happen.
After the test, the participants were told that they could do anything they wanted to reduce or cancel the effects of writing or thinking about the sentence. The results were fascinating.
As you can see in the graph, the Protestants were much more likely to try to neutralise the words - typically by doing things like tearing up the paper, scribbling over the words, or flipping the paper over.
The researchers think this is because Christian theology encourages thought-action fusion. It crops up in many popular bits of the bible - like the commandment against coveting, and Jesus' warnings that lust is the same as adultery and that hating your brother is equivalent to being a murderer. What's more, other studies have found that more religious people do indeed show more thought-action fusion.
But I'm not so sure. I suspect it's the other way round. To me, it seems more likely that this is yet another of those cognitive predispositions that just make religion seem more plausible. I suspect that the reason I am an atheist is that this way of thinking about the world just seems downright alien to me.
What do you think?
Berman, N., Abramowitz, J., Pardue, C., & Wheaton, M. (2010). The relationship between religion and thought–action fusion: Use of an in vivo paradigm Behaviour Research and Therapy DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2010.03.021
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Berman, N., Abramowitz, J., Pardue, C., & Wheaton, M. (2010) The relationship between religion and thought–action fusion: Use of an in vivo paradigm. Behaviour Research and Therapy. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2010.03.021
- May 25, 2010
- 04:55 PM
- 798 views
Science can't prove that! How rejecting evolution leads to rejecting science
Recent studies have shown that, at least in the USA, science and religion don't really mix. Religious people tend to have worse understanding of science, and scientists are, of course, far less religious that the general population (probably because they start out that way, before they ever get to university).
We also know that religious people are much more likely to reject evolution. You think there's a connection here? Well, no doubt. But new research suggests that the connection runs deeper than you might assume.
Geoffrey Munro, of Towson University in Maryland, has shown that people who are confronted with scientific evidence that conflicts with their beliefs are more likely to reject science as a source of evidence. Rather than modifying their beliefs, they move the goalposts!
What he did was to show undergrads some brief research summaries that had been tweaked so that the results either supported or refuted the notion that homosexuality is linked to mental illness. Of course, for some of these undergrads the 'research' they were shown conflicted with their beliefs, and for some it supported their beliefs.
Then they were asked about what information sources they would turn to to help them decide about whether the US should have the death penalty. They could choose from scientific research (into whether or not it reduces violent crime, what the cost to taxpayers was, etc), or from a variety of subjective opinions: from crime experts (judges, prison wardens), or moralists (religious leaders, philosophers), families of victims, or supporters or opponents of the death penalty.
The results were clear. People who had just read research that conflicted with their beliefs about homosexuality were less likely to see the value of science in helping them decide about the death penalty.
And when they were asked to choose the one source they would turn to first, there was a dramatic drop in support for science - from 54.3% for people who's beliefs were previously confirmed by science, down to 24.4% for those whose beliefs were previously refuted.
This fits in with the attitudes of the religious towards evolution. There are a large number of Americans - some 30%, if you crunch the numbers -who understand the theory of evolution, but they simply reject it because it conflicts with their beliefs.
If Munro is right, then the inevitable consequence is that these people will also become sceptical of science in general.
And in case you're wondering whether these undergrads changed their beliefs towards homosexuals at all as a result of the scientific research they were shown (whether it conflicted or agreed with those beliefs), then the answer is "no". Not a jot!
Munro, G. (2010). The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40 (3), 579-600 DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00588.x
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Munro, G. (2010) The Scientific Impotence Excuse: Discounting Belief-Threatening Scientific Abstracts. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 40(3), 579-600. DOI: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2010.00588.x
- May 22, 2010
- 05:43 PM
- 1,231 views
Lessons from the Indonesian financial crisis of 1998
The Indonesian Financial Crisis of 1998 was disastrous for the families caught up in it. The rupiah devalued by 80%, and food prices more than doubled. Worst affected was the price of rice, which rose by 280%.
As a result, the monthly surplus that the average family had to spend on non-food items dropped by two-thirds - from $7.34 to $2.64.
In the period spanning the crisis, the Indonesian Central Statistics Office ran a series of surveys - the Hundred Villages Survey - which followed over 1000 households as they struggled to cope. One of their findings was that, in the aftermath of the crash, Indonesians increased their participation in Pengajian (communal study of the Koran in Arabic), and they were also more likely to send their children to Islamic schools.
Daniel Chen, of the University of Chicago, has looked through the numbers in some detail. He was able to pick out those people most exposed to the financial crisis. For example, the wages of government employees were fixed, and so they were hit hard.
What's more, since the worst inflation was in the price of rice, those people who farmed rice were less affected.
Sure enough, the increases in Pengjian and sending children to Islamic schools were greatest for government employees, and least for rice farmers.
Why this should be? It's not because people had more time on their hands - other communal activities didn't increase, and people hit hardest by the crisis actually worked longer hours. And it's not because Islamic schools are cheaper. In fact, they are more expensive, and what's more children educated in Islamic schools don't earn as much when they leave as children who go to secular schools.
It seems to be that religious institutions help to insulate people from the economic shocks. People who increased their religious participation decreased their need to borrow from relatives. What seems to be happening is that religious institution are acting as a kind of localised insurance system, taking from people according to their religious intensity, and redistributing to those in crisis according to their religious comittment.
In other words, religion facilitates the ramping up of 'group identity' in response to crisis.
Now of course there are other ways of dealing with financial crisis. Wealthy nations typically do this by various forms of social insurance. And it seems that exactly the same thing did happen in the Indonesian crisis, albeit in a patchy way.
Because in those areas where credit was available (in the form of banks, microfinance institutions, or a rural financial system called 'BRI loan products'), the effect of financial distress on religious intensity was reduced by 80%.
The Indonesian provides a stark example of how state institutions are in direct competition with religious ones. It's something to bear in mind as we watch how patterns of religious behaviour change in response to the current crisis.
Chen, D. (2010). Club Goods and Group Identity: Evidence from Islamic Resurgence during the Indonesian Financial Crisis Journal of Political Economy, 118 (2), 300-354 DOI: 10.1086/652462
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Chen, D. (2010) Club Goods and Group Identity: Evidence from Islamic Resurgence during the Indonesian Financial Crisis. Journal of Political Economy, 118(2), 300-354. DOI: 10.1086/652462
- May 18, 2010
- 05:52 PM
- 772 views
Will the financial crisis turn people to religion?
Well, we have a global financial crisis. We also know that religion is a source of solace for a lot of people. So will the financial crisis mean boom times for religion?
The answer is probably yes, but not in a way that's straightforward. That's the message from two new studies, one in the US (which is the topic of this post) and one in Indonesia (which I'll write up in the next post). The Indonesian one is particularly interesting because it's not often we get insights into the role of religion outside the Western world.
But let's look first at the US study, by Matt Bradshaw at the University of North Carolina and Chris Ellison at the University of Texas.
They took a look at data from the US General Social Survey that was gathered back in 1998 to see whether psychological distress (whether people said they felt restless, hopeless, depressed, etc) was linked to being poverty. And of course they were interested in how this connected with different aspects of religion.
Turns out that, in case anyone doubted it, wealth really does make you happy - or at least less stressed. But although those people stuck at the bottom of the pile in the USA felt more stressed, the effect wasn't huge - only about 10% of the variation in stress was explained by poverty.
They also found that, in general, people who went to church more often were less stressed. The opposite effect occurs with prayer, though - people who pray more are more stressed (presumably that's partly why they pray).
So here's the big question. Is religion particularly effective in reducing the stress of poor people? The answer to that is yes, but in a surprising way.
Because although overall belief in the afterlife wasn't linked to less stress, it proved to be the biggest factor in helping the religious poor deal to deal with stress of their situation. Sugarcandy Mountain, anyone?
You can see the interaction clearly in this graphic. Wealthy people are pretty relaxed, whether or not they believe in the afterlife. Those who are poor are more stressed - except for those who have consoling beliefs in the afterlife. In these people, stress levels are reduced to levels similar to that of the rich.
It seems that the hopes of being wealthy in the next life can make up for the reality of this one.
There was a similar effect with religious attendance. Going to Church makes rich and poor less stressed, but the effect is particularly strong among the poor.
Surprisingly, although meditation didn't reduce stress on average, it did seem to reduce the stress caused by financial hardship. Perhaps this just shows that people who meditate don't see wealth as a measure of their personal success or social status, and so are unfazed if they happen to be poor.
Unexpectedly, prayer doesn't help poor people accept their low status. Poor people who pray a lot are just as stressed as those who don't pray.That's interesting because an earlier study found that both a belief in the afterlife and prayer help people who have recently had a financial shock.
Perhaps this suggests a certain realism on the part of those doing the praying. If you've just recently come into financial problems, you might hold out hope that your God will reverse those problems if you pray.
But once you've been stuck in the poverty trap for a while, you may well resign yourself to the prospect that your God is not going to help you - not in this life, at least!
Bradshaw, M., & Ellison, C. (2010). Financial Hardship and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Buffering Effects of Religion☆ Social Science & Medicine DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.015
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
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Bradshaw, M., & Ellison, C. (2010) Financial Hardship and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Buffering Effects of Religion☆. Social Science . DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.03.015
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