262 posts · 237,029 views
Epiphenom
262 posts
Sort by Latest Post, Most Popular
View by Condensed, Full
- November 17, 2009
- 11:10 AM
- 682 views
Religious brain, pragmatist brain
Here's a brain-scanning study with a difference. Most such tudies try to work out which parts of the brain are activated when people have religious thoughts. This new one looks at whether religious people have more or fewer nerve cells in different parts of their brains.It's by the team lead by Jordan Grafman that published a study earlier in the year on brain activation. This latest study uses data from the same brain scans.Basically, the deal is that they boiled their subjects' religious belie........ Read more »
Kapogiannis D, Barbey AK, Su M, Krueger F, & Grafman J. (2009) Neuroanatomical variability of religiosity. PloS one, 4(9). PMID: 19784372
- November 8, 2009
- 02:20 AM
- 834 views
Income inequality drives church attendance
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:... Read more »
Stijn Ruiter, & Frank van Tubergen. (2009) Religious Attendance in Cross-National Perspective: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Countries. American Journal of Sociology. info:/
- November 1, 2009
- 03:08 AM
- 779 views
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 magazine, for one, carried a report - which got up the nose of a writer on the GetReligion blog. Here's the offending paragraph:
Nevertheless, both morality researchers and olfactory scientists agree that people do strongly associate physical cleanliness with purity of conscience. It is the notion at the heart of adages like “cleanlines........ Read more »
Schnall S, Benton J, & Harvey S. (2008) With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 19(12), 1219-22. PMID: 19121126
- October 28, 2009
- 05:01 PM
- 1,357 views
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 comes up the immediate question is: will the religious inexorably 'out-breed' the nonreligious?The answer to that rather depends on how religion (or lack of it) is transmitted through the generations. Luckily enough, there's just been a very nice study on this by Vern Bengston, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sou........ Read more »
Bengtson, V., Copen, C., Putney, N., & Silverstein, M. (2009) A Longitudinal Study of the Intergenerational Transmission of Religion. International Sociology, 24(3), 325-345. DOI: 10.1177/0268580909102911
- October 25, 2009
- 04:58 PM
- 990 views
The doctors who hasten death
... Read more »
Seale C. (2009) Hastening death in end-of-life care: A survey of doctors. Social science . PMID: 19837498
- October 22, 2009
- 05:47 PM
- 809 views
The Malthusian time bomb
... Read more »
Strayhorn JM, & Strayhorn JC. (2009) Religiosity and teen birth rate in the United States. Reproductive health, 14. PMID: 19761588
- October 18, 2009
- 04:49 PM
- 861 views
When people stop believing in God... they go mental?
Probably the most famous thing that GK Chesterton never said was that:When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything.Even if he never did say those words, the quote clearly strikes a chord with a lot of people. The meme has legs.But is it true? A lot of people these days are moving away from traditional religions into various kinds of 'New Age' beliefs. Are they really more delusional than the religious - and how do they compare to atheists, for that ........ Read more »
Aird, R., Scott, J., McGrath, J., Najman, J., & Al Mamun, A. (2009) Is the New Age phenomenon connected to delusion-like experiences? Analysis of survey data from Australia. Mental Health, Religion , 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/13674670903131843
- October 15, 2009
- 04:34 PM
- 533 views
The merry-go-round between uncertainty, error detection, and religion
This is a post about psychology, and about the how stress, anxiety and uncertainty might lead people to be more religious - and the consequence of that. What triggered it was a NY Times article featuring a recent study. Here's an excerpt:Dr. Proulx and Dr. Heine described having 20 college students read an absurd short story based on “The Country Doctor,” by Franz Kafka. The doctor of the title has to make a house call on a boy with a terrible toothache. He makes the journey and finds that ........ Read more »
Proulx T, & Heine SJ. (2009) Connections from Kafka: exposure to meaning threats improves implicit learning of an artificial grammar. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 20(9), 1125-31. PMID: 19656338
- October 11, 2009
- 05:39 PM
- 689 views
Religion and volunteering
The last post was on religion and work ethic. So to follow up here's another new paper on a similar topic: religion and volunteering.Religious people do more voluntary work than non-religious people. According to a June 2009 Canadian report, the 15% people who go to Church every week make up 26% of the volunteer workforce.It's difficult to figure out exactly why this should be. Is it spiritual beliefs? The evidence I put up in my previous post, linking religious beliefs to a small increase in w........ Read more »
Suanet, B., Broese van Groenou, M., & Braam, A. (2009) Changes in volunteering among young old in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2002: the impact of religion, age-norms, and intergenerational transmission. European Journal of Ageing, 6(3), 157-165. DOI: 10.1007/s10433-009-0119-7
- October 8, 2009
- 05:45 PM
- 912 views
The Protestant 'Work-Shy' Ethic?
At the start of the 20th Century, the sociologist Max Weber came up with a famous theory to explain why Northern Europe and North America were so prosperous: the Protestant Work Ethic.Basically, the idea was that a unique feature of Protestant Christianity is its emphasis on work as a duty to God. While other religions asked people to do things that were laborious and time consuming, only Protestantism (so the theory went) channelled that religious duty into productive work.It's important to tak........ Read more »
Hans Geser. (2009) Work Values and Christian Religiosity: An Ambiguous Multidimensional Relationship. Journal of Religion and Society, 11(24). info:/
- October 5, 2009
- 05:23 PM
- 816 views
Brain patterns of belief
Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, has just published a second brain imaging study of religious belief.Harris and his colleagues were interested in two questions. Firstly, how does the brain process ideas of 'belief' and 'disbelief' - and does it differ when you are talking about religious beliefs or other kinds of beliefs.Secondly, which bits of the brain evaluate religious beliefs, and do they differ from the evaluation of non-religious beliefs.It was the usual neuroimaging deal: take so........ Read more »
Harris S, Kaplan JT, Curiel A, Bookheimer SY, Iacoboni M, & Cohen MS. (2009) The neural correlates of religious and nonreligious belief. PloS one, 4(10). PMID: 19794914
- October 1, 2009
- 04:03 PM
- 802 views
How to spot them in the wild: visual characteristics of religious v nonreligious
There was a study in the New Scientist earlier this year linking what people look like with their personality (I blogged it a few weeks ago). It turned out that it was possible to spot the religious women in the sample from their faces alone.Now interpreting this was a little tricky, because the non-religious 'typical face' was smiling, and the religious one wasn't. Which suggests that, in the UK at least, you can spot religious people because they don't smile.But here's a new study, from the US........ Read more »
Naumann LP, Vazire S, Rentfrow PJ, & Gosling SD. (2009) Personality Judgments Based on Physical Appearance. Personality and social psychology bulletin. PMID: 19762717
- September 29, 2009
- 09:00 AM
- 693 views
Why religious communes succeed and secular ones fail
Here's an interesting graph. It's from a study comparing religious and secular communes in 19th century USA. Michael was talking about this study in the comments so I thought it would be nice to show the data and talk it through.It looks at how long each commune lasted, and compares it with the onerous commitments (everything from giving up certain kinds of food, to abstaining from sex, to cutting ties with the outside world) that each commune demanded from its members.There's two things to no........ Read more »
Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. (2003) Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239. DOI: 10.1177/1069397103037002003
- September 29, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 853 views
Why religious communes succeed and secular ones fail
Here's an interesting graph. It's from a study comparing religious and secular communes in 19th century USA. Michael was talking about this study in the comments so I thought it would be nice to show the data and talk it through.
It looks at how long each commune lasted, and compares it with the onerous commitments (everything from giving up certain kinds of food, to abstaining from sex, to cutting ties with the outside world) that each commune demanded from its members.... Read more »
Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. (2003) Cooperation and Commune Longevity: A Test of the Costly Signaling Theory of Religion. Cross-Cultural Research, 37(2), 211-239. DOI: 10.1177/1069397103037002003
- September 18, 2009
- 05:39 PM
- 995 views
Professional obligations versus personal ethics: what doctors think
In the last post, I reported on a study into whether religious people are more likely to support the Supreme Court to judge matters of right and wrong. Apparently they are. This is in line with the well-known fact that religious people are more likely to have authoritarian natures.But it doesn't necessarily follow that religious people are more likely to obey authorities if those authorities are religious. There's some good evidence of this from studies of physicians. The most recent has just b........ Read more »
Lawrence RE, & Curlin FA. (2009) Physicians' beliefs about conscience in medicine: a national survey. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 84(9), 1276-82. PMID: 19707071
- September 15, 2009
- 04:16 PM
- 822 views
The intimate connection between religion and authoritarianism
It's well known that religious people are more likely to be authoritarian than non-religious people. By 'authoritarian' I mean someone who's predisposed to follow the dictates of a strong leader and traditional, conventional values.But, in a secular society, this leads to a potential for conflict. How do religious people respond if the government authority contradicts religious authority? A new study suggests that it depends on how firm their moral convictions are.First off, let me just quote fr........ Read more »
Wisneski, D., Lytle, B., & Skitka, L. (2009) Gut Reactions: Moral Conviction, Religiosity, and Trust in Authority. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1059-1063. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02406.x
- September 8, 2009
- 05:30 PM
- 704 views
A prayer a day to make you grateful
People who pray more are also often more grateful about, well, stuff. For instance, they're more likely to agree that "I have so much in life to be grateful for" (here's a Gratitude Scale, with six other similar questions).Here's the thing, though. Is it the prayer that makes people grateful, or is it just that people who are grateful are more likely to pray?It's a classic problem, and the only way to really sort it out is to do an 'interventional' study. That's one in which you take a group of ........ Read more »
Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Braithwaite, S., Graham, S., & Beach, S. (2009) Can prayer increase gratitude?. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 1(3), 139-149. DOI: 10.1037/a0016731
- September 5, 2009
- 04:46 PM
- 710 views
By their faces you will recognize them
Does this look like a religious woman to you? According to a study by Prof Richard Wiseman in the New Scientist in February this year (hey, I've only just read it, OK?), this is a typical face of a religious person in the UK.What they did was to ask readers to send in photos of themselves, along with a rating of their personality. They digitised the key features, and produced an average of each personality type. When other people were asked to guess the personality based on face alone, they wer........ Read more »
Rees, TJ. (2009) Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. Journal of Religion and Society. DOI: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html
- September 2, 2009
- 04:48 PM
- 865 views
Why are atheists so disliked?
Bruce Hood has a post up about the atheist bus ad controversy in the US state of Iowa (OK, it was a couple of weeks ago, but I've been away...). What caught my eye was a comment by Konrad:The thing that got me was the governor of the state saying that he found the ad disturbing. Clearly, people seem to treat religious adherence as symbolic of group identity so that they find the idea of atheists in their midst as threatening as that of enemy spies.The hostile reaction to what was a pretty innocu........ Read more »
Rees, TJ. (2009) Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. Journal of Religion and Society. DOI: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html
- August 23, 2009
- 01:05 PM
- 850 views
Is the Social Function of Religion Changing?
One of the leading theories of why religion is so popular goes by the ominous name of 'Terror Management Theory'. Put simply, this is the idea that people turn to religion to ease their fear of death.Gareth Morris and Tina McAdie, of Huddersfield University in the UK, set out to test this idea in a group of mostly young people (a mix of Christians, Muslims, and the non-religious) recruited within the University.The study was simple, but the results were very interesting.While Christians did inde........ Read more »
Morris, G., & McAdie, T. (2009) Are personality, well-being and death anxiety related to religious affiliation?. Mental Health, Religion , 12(2), 115-120. DOI: 10.1080/13674670802351856
Rees, TJ. (2009) Is Personal Insecurity a Cause of Cross-National Differences in the Intensity of Religious Belief?. Journal of Religion and Society. DOI: http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html
topics
join us!
Do you write about peer-reviewed research in your blog? Use ResearchBlogging.org to make it easy for your readers — and others from around the world — to find your serious posts about academic research.
If you don't have a blog, you can still use our site to learn about fascinating developments in cutting-edge research from around the world.
