Religion is halfway between a fact and an opinion - according to kids and adults

Is it possible for two people to disagree, and for both to be right?

Well it depends, of course, on what they're disagreeing about. If it's a matter of fact ('Dinosaurs are extinct'), then the answer is 'no'. On the other hand, if the discussion is about what flavour of ice cream is best then, well we are probably going to have to agree to differ.

But is religion a fact or an opinion? And do kids draw the same distinction as adults? To find out, Larisa Heiphetz (a psychologist at Harvard University in the USA) and colleagues quizzed 100 children about a faraway planet, Tamsena.

The children of planet Tamsena have a lot of conflicting opinions about things like the spirit world ("All of the invisible spirits on Tamsena live under the ground" vs. "All of the invisible spirits on Tamsena live in the tops of the trees"), matters of fact ("The first king of Tamsena was called Benjamin Smith" vs. "The first king of Tamsena was called Daniel Jones"), and matters of opinion ("Mankala is the most fun game to play" vs. "Ubuthi is the most fun game to play").

The kids were asked whether or not the two Tamsenites could both be right about these matters, or if only one of them could be right. They asked 37 adults (average age 27 years) the same questions.

The results suggested that, although seemed to be a trend with increasing age, the same pattern of results was seen in all age groups.

While most people believed that only one person can be right about factual questions, most also believed that both could be right about matters of preference.

And questions involving mystical beings were half way between the two.

Interestingly, there seemed to be a trend towards ambivalence with increasing age - although this wasn't really confirmed statistically. It looks like older people are more likely to accept that there are many issues about which multiple opinions may be correct (or, at least, about which it's not possible to tell).

So that's a fantasy planet? What about questions about the real world?

Well they did a similar study but instead involving real questions of fact and preference, and about religion. They got pretty much the same results, although a little less clear cut (that's probably because having some knowledge of the answers to the questions helped the children to judge whether they were matters of fact or opinion).

Heiphetz and colleagues conclude that:

Children as young as 5 years seem to represent other minds as capable of containing conflicting beliefs. Additionally, around the age of 7 years, children become more likely to say that two people whose preferences conflict can both be right. This developmental shift may reflect children’s increasing experience with contradictory preferences as they begin elementary school and learn to navigate the conflicting preferences of their peers.

So it seems that children do have to learn (or develop the ability) to understand that differences of opinion can be legitimate.

But at every age, both children and adults seem to agree that religion occupies some kind of half-way house between fact and opinion!

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Heiphetz, L., Spelke, E., Harris, P., & Banaji, M. (2013). The development of reasoning about beliefs: Fact, preference, and ideology Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49 (3), 559-565 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2012.09.005

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Countries with a state religion also have fewer political and civil freedoms

It's fairly common for a national government to explicitly favour one particular religion or sect. This support can take many forms - financial, political, or legal - but the common factor is that the dominant religion gets a helping hand from the state.

Now it probably wouldn't be too much of a surprise to learn that states inclined to interfere in religious expression are also more likely to place a controlling hand on political and civic freedoms, However, proving that relationship is not so straightforward.

Just defining "State Religion" is tricky enough. Several teams have created scorecards for country freedoms, but they disagree over the number of countries that have a state religion (somewhere between 48 and 75).

Even so, Steven Kettell at the University of Warwick in the UK, has pored over these statistics and come up with some interesting findings.

First off, he confirmed that countries with a state religion really do have substantially lower than average levels of political rights and civil liberties. This was chiefly down to countries with a Muslim majority, which are disproportionately likely to have fewer freedoms and also a state religion.

They also have higher levels of "social regulation" of religion - meaning that there are informal, unofficial barrier confronting other religions and favouring the state religion. They also have higher levels of religious persecution.

However, the striking thing was that, whereas general social and political freedoms were higher in nations with greater human development (a mix of wealth, health and education), there was no relationship between human development and the presence or absence of a state religion. There was also no connection to religious diversity or religiosity in general.

That lead Kettell to conclude that:

...the lower levels of freedom found in countries with state religions may have less to do with their particular socio-cultural conditions, and more to do with the institutional mechanics of state religions themselves. Given that the entire point and purpose of a state religion is to support the promotion of one particular religious perspective over other world-views, and given that this objective invariably involves the provision of various financial, legal and political privileges, it is not hard to see how these dynamics can lead to the curtailing of political and religious freedoms.

So, state religion and freedom: cause or effect?

The question matters, because religious protectionism is on the rise in the West. If such protectionism actually leads to other infringements of civil liberties, we could be in for a rough time.

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Kettell, S. (2013). State Religion and Freedom: A Comparative Analysis Politics and Religion, 1-32 DOI: 10.1017/S1755048312000600

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Religion doesn't seem to protect against depression.

In most countries, religious people tend to be happier and less depressed, and it's often suggested that religion somehow provides a happiness boost and protects against depression.

Maybe, so the thought process goes, religious belief alone is enough to perk people up, but even if it doesn't then participating in religious gatherings, and the social support that goes with it - well surely that's got to help.

It's an attractive idea, but the problem is that it's really difficult to unpick cause and effect. Maybe it's simply that depressed people stop being religious. That's certainly what a study that came out last year suggested.

About the only way to tease this out is to follow people over time, and see who gets depressed and who doesn't. That's what Michael King (University College London) and colleagues have done in a recent international study.

They interviewed 8318 patients without depression attending doctor's surgeries in the Chile, Estonia, The Netherlands, Portugal, UK, Spain, and Slovenia. Then they interviewed them again 6 and 12 months later (well, most of them - some, especially the younger and less educated, didn't turn up to later interviews).

They found that significantly more of the participants who actively practised religion (10.3%) or had a spiritual world view (10.5%) experienced an episode of major depression over those 12 months compared with those who had a secular outlook (7%).

Once they'd adjusted for differences in the characteristics of the people in the depressed and non-depressed groups (age, sex, education, employment, social support, past history of depression and country), only 'spiritual world view' (and not active religious participation) remained a significant predictor of future depression. And the country where this effect was strongest was the UK.

Among those who said they were spiritual or religious at baseline, there was a clear relationship between the strength of belief and the risk of depression. That's shown in the figure - while the risk of depression for those who were only weakly religious was similar to the non-believers (at 7.4%), for the strong believers the risk rose to 12.5%.

They concluded that:

Although our main finding of an association between religious life understanding and onset of depression varied by country, we found no evidence that spirituality may protect people, and only weak evidence that a religious life view was possibly protective in two countries (Slovenia and The Netherlands). Finally, there was no moderating effect of religious and spiritual understanding of life on the impact of life events on onset of major depression.

So religion doesn't seem to protect people from depression, and spirituality in the absence of religious affiliation seems to be a positive risk factor - especially in the UK.

That chimes with other studies (including a recent one by King himself [see references below], and one showing that New Agers are particularly prone to delusional beliefs). What does that mean?

Probably only that people who are prone to psychological problems tend to drop out of organised religion...

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Leurent, B., Nazareth, I., Bellón-Saameño, J., Geerlings, M., Maaroos, H., Saldivia, S., Švab, I., Torres-González, F., Xavier, M., & King, M. (2013). Spiritual and religious beliefs as risk factors for the onset of major depression: an international cohort study Psychological Medicine, 1-12 DOI: 10.1017/S0033291712003066

King, M., Marston, L., McManus, S., Brugha, T., Meltzer, H., & Bebbington, P. (2012). Religion, spirituality and mental health: results from a national study of English households The British Journal of Psychiatry, 202 (1), 68-73 DOI: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.112003

This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.