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 a
11 Vote(s)
July 7, 2010
What values motivate the non-religious in the UK?
Comments Off
June 7, 2010
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
6 Vote(s)
6 Vote(s)
Comments Off
February 21, 2010
How come Intelligence, religion, and fertility are linked?
Here's a new study looking at the connection between religion, fertility, and IQ at a national level. We know from previous studies that countries where people are, on average, more religious also tend to have higher average fertility and lower average IQ.The problem is that we also know that countries that have lower average IQ also have higher fertility. So teasing out the two factors is not ob
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
Comments Off
January 14, 2010
Can Religion Explain Prosociality and Can Science Explain Religion?
... Norenzayan A, & Shariff AF. (2008) The origin and evolution of religious prosociality. Science (New York, N.Y.), 322(5898), 58-62. PMID: 18832637 The origin and evolution of religious prosociality.
16 Vote(s)
16 Vote(s)
Comments Off
January 13, 2010
Religion makes you desirable… in the USA but not in Britain
The previous post took a look at some recent research on how competition for mates affects how religious people say they are. When a group of students in the US were subtly reminded that there's a lot of competition for potential mates, they responded by claiming to be more religious. One potential explanation for this is simply that being religious is seen as socially desirable.If this were true
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
Comments Off
January 10, 2010
Get religion and get laid
Humans adapt their mating strategies according to what they think their chances are. For example, when there are more men than women, people marry earlier and divorce less. When there are more women, the opposite applies. The supposition is that this this is because, when women are in a 'buyers market' they are more able to demand fidelity.What's more, when women are shown an array of attractive,
16 Vote(s)
16 Vote(s)
Comments Off
October 29, 2009
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
9 Vote(s)
9 Vote(s)
Comments Off
October 12, 2009
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 b
7 Vote(s)
7 Vote(s)
Comments Off
September 26, 2009
Religion as a costly signal: why the idea is bunk
In the previous post I mentioned the idea of costly signalling. And that's prompted this post, which has been gestating for a while, about the 'costly signalling' explanation for religion. I think the idea is fundamentally flawed, and to explain why I'm going to lean on an essay by Jeff Schloss, who's an evolutionary biologist and ex-member of the Discovery Institute! (You can read more about tha
9 Vote(s)
9 Vote(s)
Comments Off
July 6, 2009
Christian morality: the Sunday effect
Scientific studies into the effect of religion on behaviour make heavy use of priming studies. Basically, these studies test the effects of a subliminal flash of a religious word. If behaviour changes, then that's taken as evidence that religion causes the effects.The message that comes out of these studies tends to be that these subliminal prompts have all sorts of interesting effects, and are p
17 Vote(s)
17 Vote(s)
Comments Off