In the first of the SSNB/NSRN Methods Blog series, Elisa Järnefelt introduces us to methods for researching, not the religious-like and religion-related beliefs we consciously think we hold, but the ones we unconsciously hold – which work to shape our attitudes, behaviours and relationships with others beneath our awareness.

Have you ever caught yourself thinking a thought that you do not agree with? For example, imagine yourself standing in a field. Does it feel and look like the Earth you are standing on is flat and ends at the edge of a horizon? For most of us, the answer is yes. Yet, if you think more about it, you most likely will realize that you believe that the Earth is not flat but a revolving spherical object orbiting around another spherical object.

This is what philosopher Robert N. McCauley (2011) refers to as the difference between “natural and practiced cognition”. Psychologists Jonathan St. B. Evans (2003) and Keith Stanovich, (2004) on the other hand, use expressions like “the presence of two minds in one brain” and “a brain at war with itself”. These scholars agree, however, that people form beliefs in (at least) two different ways: fast and slow (Kahneman, 2011). People rely on their immediate and spontaneous beliefs the world to guide their actions but also often slowly and deliberately reflect. This can often lead to personal contradictions at the different levels of cognitive processing. For example, previous research has identified differences in people’s implicit and explicit beliefs and reasoning about gender, race, and economics (see e.g., Kahneman, 2003, 2011; Sadler, Correll, Park & Judd, 2012).

Religion and nonreligion are not exceptions to this. As much as people’s self-understanding of their own religious or nonreligious beliefs and identities are important to take into account, we all have thoughts of which we are not necessarily aware. For example, previous research has found that although atheists do not explicitly believe in either the purpose or purposeful creation of nature, when they have to quickly decide whether “the sun makes light so that plants can photosynthesize”, or that “some being purposefully made”  trees, rivers and fish, their responses reveal spontaneous teleological and intentional forms of reasoning (Järnefelt, Canfield & Kelemen, 2015; Kelemen & Rosset, 2009; Kelemen, Rottman & Seston, 2013).

The importance of assessing the implicit level of religious and nonreligious beliefs is not to show that people can contradict themselves. Rather, such findings are relevant for understanding more indirect causes of people’s behavior and for explaining why certain types of explicit beliefs are more easily spread (e.g., Mercier & Sperber, 2008; Sperber, 1996).

When studying implicit processes in the context of religion and nonreligion, researchers have utilized both quantitative and qualitative methods. A common methodological feature that these studies share is that they assess people’s beliefs indirectly. This means that, instead of asking the participants to report their own evaluation of the effects of their beliefs, participants are not fully aware of the particular beliefs the researchers are measuring. To clarify, I will offer two examples – one from a quantitative methodology, and one from the qualitative one.

One way to assess implicit effects of people’s beliefs is through priming methods. When priming participants, researchers activate people’s thinking about certain phenomena without the participants being explicitly aware of this activation. For example, in a series of studies, Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan (2012) were interested in assessing whether people’s belief in the Abrahamic God, who is traditionally characterized as morally monitoring and able to punish, has implicit effects on their sense of being monitored. In order to implicitly activate participants’ thoughts about God, the researchers gave them sets of words (Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007) that they were instructed to re-arrange into sentences by dropping one word. Participants in the control condition arranged words that did not relate to religion whereas the participants in the test condition arranged words that referred to various religious concepts familiar in the Abrahamic tradition (i.e., God, spirit, divine, prophet and sacred). The researchers were interested in seeing whether such priming would increase participants’ sense of being socially monitored.

What the researchers found was that explicit God-believers were affected by thinking about the religious concepts and showed increases, for example, in socially desirable responding whereas the effects were less consistent with the participants who did not explicitly believe in God. When debriefing the participants afterwards, it was confirmed that these effects had happened without the participants being aware of the religious prime or being aware of the focus of the study. This implies that, for explicit believers, unconsciously thinking about a morally-interested supernatural agent has similar implicit psychological and behavioral consequences as being monitored by another person.

Other researchers have used qualitative methods to assess implicit beliefs. For example, Bethany Heywood and Jesse M. Bering (2013) were interested in assessing whether people’s tendency to understand events in life in terms of purpose is caused solely by explicit theistic belief, or whether a purpose-based understanding of life is a more general and widely-shared cognitive tendency. To explore this, they conducted semi-structured interviews. However, similarly to the previous study, participants did not know the exact focus of the study beforehand. Furthermore, instead of asking explicit questions about whether the participants understood their life-events in reference to purpose, or whether they understood their religious or nonreligious beliefs to play a role in their interpretations, participants were asked several questions about various aspects of important events in their lives. The level of teleological or purpose-based descriptions in the participants’ responses was then assessed by coding the content of the answers. The researchers found that when participants were not simultaneously asked to think about their explicit religious/nonreligious beliefs or identities, but just to describe the causes of their own life-altering events, both theists and atheists held similar purpose-based beliefs about their lives. This does not mean that atheists in the study were believers in disguise. It only shows that people’s explicit identities and beliefs are often only a half of the story.

These examples are just a fraction of the theoretical and methodological possibilities for exploring implicit religious and nonreligious beliefs. While implicit measures require special attention during study design, they open up many interesting opportunities to explore the interrelations between the explicit and implicit levels of religious and nonreligious beliefs.

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Dr Elisa Järnefelt received her PhD in the Study of Religion from the University of Helsinki, Finland. As part of her doctoral and the following postdoctoral research she was a visiting scholar at the Child Cognition Lab at Boston University, and combined the theoretical and methodological perspectives of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology with the Study of Religion. Recently, she has worked as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society at Newman University, UK. Throughout her studies and research she has been interested in assessing the cognitive tendencies involved in supernatural reasoning, especially when people think about the origin of natural phenomena. She is also interested in developing novel methodological approaches that help to bridge between the various disciplinary perspectives in practice.

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References

Evans, J. St. B. T. (2003). In two minds: Dual-process accounts of reasoning. TRENDS in Cognitive Science, 7(10), 454–459. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.08.012

Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2013). Like a camera in the sky? Thinking about God increases public self-awareness and socially desirable responding. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(1), 298–302. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.09.006

Heywood, B. T., & Bering, J. M. (2013). ‘‘Meant to be’’: How religious beliefs and cultural religiosity affect the implicit bias to think teleologically. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 4(3), 183–201. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2013.782888

Järnefelt, E., Canfield, C. F. & Kelemen, D. (2015). The divided mind of a disbeliever: Intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults. Cognition, 140, 72-88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.02.005

Kahneman, D. (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58(9), 697–720. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.58.9.697

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Straus and Giroux: Farrar.

Kelemen, D. & Rosset, E. (2009). The human function compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition, 111(1), 138–143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.01.001

Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2013). Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies. Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1074–1083. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0030399

McCauley, R. N. (2011). Why religion is natural and science is not. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2008). Intuitive and reflective inferences. In Jonathan St. B. T Evans & Keith Frankish (Eds.), In two minds: Dual processes and beyond, pp. 149-170. Oxford University Press.

Sadler, M. S., Correll, J., Park, B. & Judd, M. (2013). The world is not black and white: Racial bias in the decision to shoot in a multiethnic context. Journal of Social Issues, 68(2), 286-313. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2012.01749.x

Shariff, A. & Norenzayan, A. (2007). God is watching you: Priming God concepts increases prosocial behavior in an anonymous economic game. Psychological Science, 18(9), 803-809. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01983.x

Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach. Blackwell Publishers.

Stanovich, K. E. (2004). Robot’s rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin. University of Chicago Press.

Over the next two months, the NSRN will work in collaboration with the Scientific Study of Nonreligious Belief* project to present a series of blogs providing practical guidance for the empirical study of nonreligious individuals, institutions and cultures, as well as exploring outstanding methodological challenges and new opportunities. In this opening blog, the series editors, Lois Lee, Stephen Bullivant, Miguel Farias and Jonathan Lanman, introduce the series.

There is growing scientific recognition of the need to understand nonreligious populations more deeply – an interest illustrated by the publication of volumes of initial research, and by research initiatives such as the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC) at Trinity College, Hartford, CT and, of course, the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN) itself.[i]

These first explorations should be particularly commended for taking on the daunting challenge of finding empirical approaches to what was, and probably still is, one the largest unresearched populations in the human sciences:[ii] at around 1.1 billion people worldwide, religious ‘nones’ count as the world’s third largest ‘religious’ group (Pew Forum 2015), yet until recently scientific studies of this and similarly-defined populations were ad hoc and nothing approaching a sustained body of work could be discerned (Bullivant and Lee 2012).

As the NSRN bibliography attests, the situation is today markedly different, and the achievements of the past decade are striking. At the same time, the sheer size of nonreligious and nontheist populations means that even this sustained effort has, in many ways, only just begun to skim the surface of the work needing to be done. Some areas are increasingly well developed – such as research with cultural and activist movements including the New Atheism, and on the topics of nonreligious identity and community formation – whilst other questions and themes are much less studied.

Even more strikingly, research into nonreligion has tended to focus on North America and some parts of Europe – with important exceptions that prove the rule. In general, first research has relied heavily on data from participants from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries, even though those countries are markedly dissimilar from other parts of the world in many respects.

Even within these settings, we do not yet have extensive understanding of how demographic factors – class, gender, ethnicity, religious background and so on – shape and are shaped by nonreligion. Particular groups are over-represented in existing studies and the comparative work needed to show how nonreligious beliefs take form as a result of different demographic positions and experiences is lacking.

The next major task for scholars of nonreligion is, then, to describe and understand the nature and variety of nonreligious perspectives, beliefs and cultural formations across different cultural and demographic contexts. This is a challenging, but exciting prospect for those engaged in the empirical study of religion, nonreligion and secularity and in related projects of theory building.

This is an endeavour that will involve inputs from researchers from across disciplines and across the world. It is also one that will require methodological precision and innovation. One of the major achievements of pioneers of scientific research in this area is the provision of methodological innovations, reflections and precedents for future research to build from. But, as an emerging field of enquiry, we do not yet have a fully-developed and centralised body of conceptual and methodological tools that will help both to consolidate and disseminate this growing body of knowledge. Likewise, with terminology, we do not have the shared reference points that would support effective communication not only across disciplines but even within them – a situation which also limits opportunities to scrutinise and develop core concepts in light of new knowledge.

Blog pieces will take one of several approaches. Some blogs will introduce readers to the approaches that have been successfully used in the study of nonreligion. Others will engage with recognised methodological challenges in the field: how, for example, can we recruit non-affiliates, that is people who do not themselves identify in explicit non-religious terms and do not participate in any non-religious organisation, for research? What concepts can we best use to approach cross-cultural research? Yet other blogs will explore new methodological possibilities and opportunities, including pieces drawing on methodological approaches in other fields.

The series aims to provide researchers with immediate and ongoing access to methodological experiences and innovations emerging in the field, as well as exploring new methods for future research. By these means the series will, we hope, dramatically improve the ease and opportunity of conducting empirical studies of the nonreligious, as well as improved opportunities to reflect upon and critique those approaches.

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*This series is part of the Scientific Study of Nonreligious Belief project, generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation in collaboration with UCL, St Mary’s University Twickenham, Coventry University and the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (NSRN). This project particularly focuses on the beliefs and meaning systems of nonreligious people – what we are calling nonreligious belief. This broad category attempts to capture the religious, religious-like, and religion-related ideas and convictions of nonaffiliates and atheists. It includes a wide array of specific beliefs, such as those about God(s) and supernatural agents, the nature and meaning of life, and the moral status of religious traditions. The blogs in this series particularly address this theme, broadly understood, though they also provide resources that will be useful beyond this framework. The project website will be launched in May 2016 and will be announced on the NSRN website.

We will continue to develop methodological resources in the longer term. If you have an idea for a blog topic or would like to get involved, please send your suggestions to Dr Lois Lee at lois.lee [at] ucl.ac.uk.

References

Bullivant, Stephen and Lois Lee. 2012. ‘Non-religion and Secularity: The State of the Union’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 27 (1), 19-27.

Pew Research Center. 2015. America’s Changing Religious Landscape, available online at: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/05/RLS-05-08-full-report.pdf (last accessed on 3 July 2015).

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[i] Michael Martin, Phil Zuckerman, Stephen Bullivant and Lois Lee, Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, Ruy Blanes and Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic have all edited significant collections in this field, whilst Johannes Quack, Christopher Smith and Richard Cimino, Lois Lee are amongst those who have published research-based monographs in the field.

[ii] It is not quite true to say that this population was entirely unresearched before 2005, but there was certainly no sustained tradition of work. See Bullivant and Lee 2012.

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Lois Lee is Research Associate at the Institute of Advanced Studies, UCL, PI on the Scientific Study of Nonreligious Belief project (John Templeton Foundation) and Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network co-director. Recent publications include Recognizing the Non-Religious: Reimagining the Secular (OUP, 2015) and Negotiating Religion: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches (Routledge, in press).

Stephen Bullivant is a Senior Lecturer at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Among other books, he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Atheism (OUP, 2013; with M. Ruse) and Secularity and Non-Religion (Routledge, 2013; with L. Lee and E. Arweck), and is currently writing The Oxford Dictionary of Atheism (OUP) with Lois Lee.

Miguel Farias leads the Brain, Belief and Behaviour group at Coventry University. He has previously been a lecturer at Oxford University where he also did his doctorate in experimental psychology. His major research interests are the psychobiological roots of beliefs and the effects of spiritual practices.

Jonathan Lanman is Assistant Director of the Institute of Cognition & Culture, and Lecturer in Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast. His research aims to utilize the tools of both cognitive and social anthropology to examine religion, atheism, morality, and intergroup relations.

Jonathan Lanman reflects on how cognitive and evolutionary studies of religion have contributed to research on atheism – and suggests how such approaches might advance our understanding of atheism in the future.

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After more than a century of development, the cognitive and evolutionary sciences now offer scholars a range of theoretical and methodological tools to better understand religion.  The use of these tools by anthropologists, psychologists, and religious studies scholars has led to the emergence of what has come to be known as the cognitive science of religion or CSR (e.g. Lawson & McCauley, 1990; Boyer 1994; Atran, 2002; Whitehouse, 2004; Barrett, 2004; Sosis, 2006; Norenzayan, 2013).

In 2007, I was convinced that CSR was making progress in explaining the ubiquity of religion but faced a real problem in accounting for atheism: if religion is so well-supported by universal cognitive mechanisms, why are there so many atheists?   Consequently, I began to investigate atheism with the cognitive and evolutionary sciences in mind, conducting fieldwork with atheist and humanist groups in the US, UK, and Denmark and running interviews, surveys, and experiments.

My research has convinced me that there are benefits to examining atheism from a cognitive perspective.  For example, a small but growing body of evidence suggests that evolved cognitive biases can help us explain who becomes a theist and who becomes a non-theist (Lanman & Buhrmester, 2016; Gervais & Najle, 2015; Henrich, Norenzayan, and Willard, forthcoming) and why some nations have higher proportions of non-theists than others (Lanman, 2012; forthcoming).

Yet, I have also been convinced that a cognitive perspective can provide a more substantial benefit to our work. Taking a cognitive perspective, I believe, allows us to escape the post-modern malaise that too-often arises when we recognize the socially-constructed nature of our key objects of analysis.  In short, a cognitive perspective helps make the scientific study of atheism possible.

The Problem: Atheism is not a “thing”

Like “religion” and the “secular”, “atheism” is a word used by a range of individuals with a range of interests, yielding substantial diversity in its definition and deployment (Bullivant, 2013).  For some it has meant a lack of devotion to the Roman deities; for others, a lack of belief in any and all non-physical agents; and for still others, a moral revolt against the Christian God.  There is no objective reason to accept one of these conceptions over another, and the word has been developed for use by social actors, not dispassionate scholars attempting to better understand the human condition.  Consequently, “atheism,” like “religion” (Smith, 1982, Fitzgerald, 2000) and the “secular,” (Asad, 2003) is a social construct.

While social constructs exist in our conceptual schemes, they are not natural kinds, whose causes and effects can be investigated across different environments (Bird & Tobin, 2016). To view “atheism” as a unified object of analysis (a “thing”), and to attempt to scientifically investigate its causes and effects across contexts, is to treat a local concept as a natural kind.  Pursuing a science of  such an “atheism” would be on par with pursuing a science of “weeds” or “trees,” concepts which are relevant for gardeners and landscape architects but not for biologists or geneticists (Boyer, 2015).  We would, like astrologers with their supposed “constellations,” be engaged in folly.

The Solution:  Fractionation

With a cognitive perspective, however, a science of “atheism” becomes possible. This seemingly miraculous trick is a gift from a principle used by cognitive scholars of religion called “fractionation” (Boyer, 1994; Whitehouse & Lanman, 2014) or “reverse engineering” (Taves, 2011). To fractionate or reverse engineer a socially-constructed concept is to break it up into distinct phenomena about whose independent existence we are more confident (though, of course, never certain).

In CSR, for example, scholars recognize that “religion” is a social construct but argue that the word “religion” labels a range of phenomena that may indeed be natural kinds.  These include:  beliefs in the existence of non-physical agents (Boyer, 2001), in the universe as a whole and certain events being designed for a purpose (Kelemen, Rottman & Seston, 2013; Heywood & Bering, 2014), and in the continuation of psychological functioning beyond death (Bering, Blasi, and Bjorklund, 2005), as well as socially-transmitted causally opaque actions (i.e. rituals) (Whitehouse, 2012; Legare et al. 2015) social identities (McElreath, Boyd & Richerson 2003; Park & van Leeuwen, 2015), and sacred values (Tetlock, 2003; Atran & Ginges, 2012). CSR has made progress in understanding religion by examining these phenomena as distinct objects of analysis, as building blocks that comprise the traditions we commonly label as “religions” (Sosis, 2009; Taves, 2015).

In my own research, I fractionate “atheism” into three elements (though there are surely more):

1) The absence of belief in the existence of non-physical agents.

2) Moral judgements of the immorality of “religion.”

3) Social identities that prominently feature the concept “atheism” or other forms of “nonreligion” (Lee 2015).

This fractionation of “atheism” is useful for at least two reasons.

First, we can have a higher level of confidence that each of these fractionated phenomena exists in the world beyond our conceptual schemes.   This confidence comes from the fact that we have progressive research programmes in the cognitive and evolutionary sciences on the causes and effects of beliefs (Boyer 2001; Bell, Halligan, and Ellis, 2006; Lanman, 2008; Farias et al., 2013), moral judgements (Graham, et al., 2012; Curry, 2016; Keane, 2015), and social identities (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; McElreath, Boyd & Richerson 2003; Park & van Leeuwen, 2015).  Thanks to this research, we have good reasons for seeing beliefs, moral judgements, and social identities as causally active, cross-cultural features of human cognition as well as a set of tools for investigating them. And while constructs such as “religion,” “atheism,” and “humanism” are social constructions, they do exist as representations in human minds, and can, consequently, become objects of belief, moral evaluation, and social allegiance.

Second, each of these fractionated phenomena exists in the absence of the others, thereby demonstrating causal independence.  We find, for example, individuals who lack explicit beliefs in the existence of non-physical agents but adhere to a Christian identity (Mountford 2011).  Similarly, we find individuals who believe in some vague non-physical agency but find “religion” immoral and even label themselves as “atheists” (Smith et al., 2015).

To lump beliefs, moral judgements, and identities together under the label “atheism” and then to analyze said “atheism” as a single phenomenon will lead only to confusion and scientific stagnation. By utilizing the cognitive strategy of fractionating “atheism” into distinct phenomena with distinct sets of causes and effects, I believe we can move forward to examine how a range of pan-human cognitive capacities and tendencies interact with particular socio-historical contexts and discourses to produce the various atheisms we study.

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Dr Jonathan Lanman is a Lecturer in Cognition and Culture and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast, and Co-PI on the Scientific Study of Nonreligious Belief project (John Templeton Foundation).  In his work on atheism, he aims to integrate theories and methodologies from the social, cognitive and evolutionary sciences with ethnographic and historical research to explain why some individuals become theists whilst others become non-theists, why some nations have higher proportions of non-theists than others, and why some non-theists engage in anti-religious social action.  He is also engaged in collaborative research on religious identity, ritual, and self-sacrifice.

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References

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press.

Atran, S. (2002). In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Rreligion. Oxford University Press.

Atran, S., & Ginges, J. (2012). Religious and sacred imperatives in human conflict. Science, 336(6083), 855-857

Barrett, J. L. (2004). Why Would Anyone Believe in God?. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Bell, V., Halligan, P. W., & Ellis, H. D. (2006). A cognitive neuroscience of belief. The Power of Belief: Psychosocial Influence on Illness, Disability and Medicine, 3-20.

Bering, J. M., Blasi, C. H., & Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). The development of afterlife beliefs in religiously and secularly schooled children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23(4), 587-607.

Bird, A. & Tobin, E. (2016). Natural Kinds, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/natural-kinds/

Boyer, P. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Univ of California Press.

Boyer, P. (2001). Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.

Boyer, P. (2015, March).  How religions became moral and spiritual.  Paper presented at the Inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.  Video available here:  https://youtu.be/URzjiqYy7lw

Bullivant, S. (2013). Defining “atheism.”. The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, 11-21.

Curry, O. S. (2016). Morality as cooperation: a problem-centred approach. In: T. K. Shackelford & R. D. Hansen (Eds.), The Evolution of Morality (pp. 27-51): Springer International Publishing.

Farias, M., Newheiser, A. K., Kahane, G., & de Toledo, Z. (2013). Scientific faith: belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 1210-1213.

Fitzgerald, T. (2000). The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford University Press.

Gervais, W. M., & Najle, M. B. (2015). Learned faith: The influences of evolved cultural learning mechanisms on belief in Gods. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 7(4), 327.

Graham, J., Haidt, J., Koleva, S., Motyl, M., Iyer, R., Wojcik, S. P., & Ditto, P. (2012). Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

Heywood, B. T., & Bering, J. M. (2014). “Meant to be”: how religious beliefs and cultural religiosity affect the implicit bias to think teleologically. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 4(3), 183-201.

Keane, W. (2015). Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories. Princeton University Press.

Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., & Seston, R. (2013). Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: Purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(4), 1074.

Lanman, J. (2008). In defense of ‘belief’: a cognitive response to behaviorism, eliminativism, and social constructivism. Issues in Ethnology & Anthropology, 3, 49-62.

Lanman, J. A. (2012). The importance of religious displays for belief acquisition and secularization. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 27(1), 49-65.

Lanman, J. (forthcoming).  An Order of Mutual Benefit:  Charles Taylor and the Cognitive Science of Religion.  In: Florian Zemmin, Florian,  Jager,Colin, and Vanheeswijk, Guido (Eds.), Working with A Secular Age: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor’s Master Narrative.   De Gruyter.

Lanman, J. A., & Buhrmester, M. D. (2016). Religious actions speak louder than words: exposure to credibility-enhancing displays predicts theism. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 1-14.

Lawson, E. T., & McCauley, R. N. (1993). Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge University Press.

Lee, L. (2015). Recognizing the Non-religious: Reimagining the Secular. OUP Oxford.

Legare, C. H., Wen, N. J., Herrmann, P. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2015). Imitative flexibility and the development of cultural learning. Cognition, 142, 351-361.

McElreath, R., Boyd, R., Richerson, P. (2003). Shared norms and the evolution of ethnic markers. Current Anthropology, 44(1), 122-129.

Mountford, B. (2011). Christian Atheist: Belonging without Believing. Winchester: John Hunt Publishing.

Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton University Press.

Park, JH & Van Leeuwen, F. (2015). Evolutionary perspectives on social identity. in: Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychology, Virgil Zeigler-Hill (Ed.)., pp. 115-125

Smith, G., Cooperman, A., Mohamed, B., Martinez, J., Alper, B., Sciupac, E.,…Ochoa, J. (2015). America’s Changing Religious Landscape. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center.

Smith, J. Z. (1982). Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown. University of Chicago Press.

Sosis, R. (2006). Religious behaviors, badges, and bans: Signaling theory and the evolution of religion. In: P. McNamara (Ed), Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies alter Our Understanding of Religion. London: Praeger, 61-86.

Sosis, R. (2009). The adaptationist-byproduct debate on the evolution of religion: Five misunderstandings of the adaptationist program. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3), 315-332.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict.The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, 33(47), 74.

Taves, A. (2011). Religious Experience Reconsidered: A building-block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things. Princeton University Press.

Taves, A. (2015).  Portrait: Ann Taves – From Weird Experiences to Revelatory Events. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 6, 1–26.

Tetlock, P. E. (2003). Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(7), 320-324.

Whitehouse, H. (2004). Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. Rowman Altamira.

Whitehouse, H. (2012).  Explaining ritual.  In: Dawes, G., & Maclaurin, J. (Eds.), A New Science of Religion. London: Routledge.

Whitehouse, H., & Lanman, J. A. (2014). The ties that bind us. Current Anthropology, 55(6), 674-695.

Willard, K., Henrich, J., & Norenzayan, A. (forthcoming). Memory and Belief in the Transmission of Counterintuitive Content. Human Nature.

 

 

Kyle Thompson examines anti-atheist prejudice in American and argues that they are generally seen as threatening ‘other’ including theistic worldviews and even fellow atheists. He suggests comparison among other prejudiced groups will help us understand why atheists are viewed so negatively by the American public.

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Although the US presidential election is not until November, Americans are already consumed by the constant campaign coverage (White 2015). As always, citizens are concerned with each candidate’s promises, plans, and scandals as well as his or her identity. In timely conjunction with this election-season fervor, Gallup recently reminded everyone just how salient certain identities are by releasing the results of its latest identity poll, which asks respondents whether they would vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate who is Muslim, or female, or homosexual, etc. (McCarthy 2015). And, for the first time since the 1978 poll, atheists, who saw a 4% improvement in approval from the 2012 poll, don’t find themselves at the bottom of the list (Jones 2012). No, it was the newly added ‘socialist’ category, likely included because of self-described ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders, that had the least approval, at 47% (Ehrenfreund 2015; McCarthy 2015).

But, before atheists start celebrating too much, they must remember that 40% of Americans said they would not vote for a well-qualified candidate based on an identity, atheism, that has nothing (necessarily) to do with his or her policies (McCarthy 2015). And it doesn’t stop there. Atheists are consistently viewed negatively by the American public, not just when running for office (Gervais et al. 2011; Edgell et al. 2006).

So what causes anti-atheist prejudice both inside and outside of the political arena?  Why are atheists viewed so negatively in the United States, even by other atheists (Wright and Nichols 2014)? To help answer these questions, we might consider a new study conducted by psychologists Corey L. Cook, Florette Cohen, and Sheldon Solomon (2015) entitled What If They’re Right About the Afterlife?  Evidence of the Role of Existential Threat on Anti-Atheist Prejudice. Adding to the ever-growing body of research on anti-atheist prejudice, which has already connected such prejudice to concerns about atheists being untrustworthy and threatening to in-group values, this study focused on the existential threat that atheism poses to theistic worldviews (Gervais et al. 2011; Cook et al. 2014). Specifically, the researchers based their hypotheses on terror management theory, originally developed by Solomon himself along with two other psychologists, which posits that “the uniquely human awareness of death gives rise to potentially paralyzing terror that is assuaged by cultural worldviews that afford a sense that one is a valuable participant in a meaningful universe,” in order to see whether atheists, by holding to a worldview which denies a belief in God or an afterlife, threaten to undermine the terror-buffer that religious worldviews often generate (Greenberg et al. 1986; Cook et al. 2015, p. 840). In brief, the two separate experiments in this study found a significant empirical link between existential concerns and anti-atheist prejudice (Cook et al. 2015).

To establish this empirical link, which Cook, Cohen, and Solomon claim is the first of its kind, the first of the two experiments had participants—236 students from the College of Staten Island—write down their thoughts about either their own death or being in extreme pain before gauging their thoughts and feelings toward either atheists or Quakers (Cook et al. 2015). The key finding here wasn’t that Americans think better of Quakers, which was in fact reflected in the data, but rather that participants who were given the subtle reminder of their deaths, when compared to those primed to think about extreme pain, were more disparaging toward atheists, rated atheists as more untrustworthy, and socially distanced themselves more from atheists (Cook et al. 2015).

For the second experiment, 200 participants from the same college were primed to think about pain, death, or atheism before being tested for the presence of implicit thoughts of death (e.g., the kind of implicit thoughts that would have someone complete “S K       L” with “skull” as opposed to “skill”).  The key finding here was that thinking about atheism or death caused the highest occurrences of implicit death thoughts.

So what exactly do these data mean?  According to Cook, Cohen, and Solomon, these two studies show that “hostility toward and mistrust of atheists is particularly pronounced when existential concerns are aroused and that, for believers, the mere contemplation of atheism can arouse intimations of mortality” (Cook et al. 2015, p. 844).  That is, the connection between death and atheism appears to be a two-way street: thoughts of death increase denigration of atheists and thoughts of atheism cause an increase in implicit death thoughts. And, I think that, given the scientific rigour of this study, the researchers are on solid ground when making this conclusion.  However, given the chosen control conditions in both experiments, this study doesn’t allow one to draw the stronger conclusion that seems to be hinted at, yet never explicitly stated, in the very framing of the publication: that the findings result from unique aspects of atheism, such as the denial of an afterlife and a disbelief in God.

That is, while the title—What If They’re Right About the Afterlife?—implies that atheists’ denial of an afterlife equates to an existential threat to common theistic worldviews, it is entirely possible that atheism disrupts terror management simply because atheists are stereotyped as a generally threatening ‘other,’ even to fellow atheists.  In other words, asking people about Quakers doesn’t tell us enough about why atheists are denigrated after death-priming.  Thus, the first experiment could have benefitted from comparing people’s reactions to atheists to other negatively viewed groups of people, such as Muslims and homosexuals, or even thieves and murderers. This would then provide more insight regarding atheists in particular as a prejudiced group.  Likewise, the second experiment would have been more revelatory had it included negatively viewed groups of people, other than atheists, as primers for implicit death thoughts.  This would have, in my estimation, helped elucidate whether or not anti-atheist prejudice results from a general distrust and dislike or from something specific to atheism, such as a rejection of an afterlife.

While social scientists may never be able to pinpoint exactly what it is about atheists that Americans find so troublesome, this study might be said to make a further contribution. The work of Cook, Cohen, and Solomon demonstrates a clear connection between existential concerns and anti-atheist prejudice while opening up the possibility for future research to examine the specifics of these concerns.  I look forward to seeing more experiments on anti-atheist prejudice, and I encourage researchers to take up the suggestion detailed at the conclusion of this study and help identify “benign ways to parry the existential threat that atheists pose to believers, thus mitigating the hostility and intolerance that they are often subjected to” (Cook et al. 2015, p. 845).  In addition, I hope that more Americans, regardless of their worldviews, will help to reduce anti-atheist prejudice by coming to understand that their fellow atheist citizens are not to be feared so that we can all begin denying presidential candidates votes not because of their views of divinity, but because of their bad ideas and policies.

References

Cook, CL, Cohen, F & Solomon, S., 2015. What if they’re right about the afterlife? Evidence of the role of existential threat on anti-atheist prejudice, Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(7), pp. 840-846.

Cook, CL, Cotrell, CA & Webster GD., 2014. No good without God: Antiatheist prejudice as a function of threats to morals and values, Psychology of Religion & Spirituality, 7(3), pp. 217-226.

Ehrenfreund, M., 2015. Are you a democratic socialist like Bernie Sanders? Take the Quiz, The Washington Post 19 November. Available from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/23/are-you-a-democratic-socialist-take-the-quiz/.  [10 December 2015].

Gervais, WM, Shariff, AF, & Norenzayan, A., 2011. Do you believe in atheists? Distrust is central to anti-atheist prejudice, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), pp. 1198-1206.

Greenberg, J, Pyszczynski T & Solomon S., 1986. The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In: Public Self and Private Self, Edited by Roy F. Baumeister, pp. 189–212. New York: Springer.

Jones, JM., 2012. Atheists, Muslims see most bias as presidential candidates, Gallup 21 June. Available from: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155285/atheists-muslims-bias-presidential-candidates.aspx. [10 December 2015].

McCarthy, J., 2015. In U.S., socialist presidential candidates least appealing, Gallup 22 June. Available from: http://www.gallup.com/poll/183713/socialist-presidential-candidates-least-appealing.aspx. [10 December 2015].

White, B., 2015. What an anxious America tells us about 2016 election, CNBC 4 August. Available from: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/04/what-an-anxious-america-tells-us-about-2016-election.html. [10 December 2015].

Wright, JC & Nichols, R., 2014. The social cost of atheism: How perceived religiosity influences moral appraisal, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 14(1), pp. 93-115.

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Kyle Thompson is a PhD candidate at Claremont Graduate University in the Philosophy program. His interests include atheism, secularism, scientism, not taking life too seriously, exploring the globe and playing music. He lives with his beautiful wife, his two amazing dogs, and his marvelously mischievous cat in Claremont, CA.