Religious people want religious leaders - of any religion

A lot of people think that the Muslim world is just fundamentally different from the Christian world. That's the basis for the idea that we're facing a clash of civilisations (a theory put forward by the American political scientist Samuel Huntingdon back in 1993).

One aspect of the theory says that religion is more tightly integrated into the political structure in Muslim countries. The idea is that the power structures of Christian religious institutions are separated from the secular power structures, which makes it easier to separate Church and State.


A team of social scientists lead by Nate Breznau at the University of Breman set out to test this idea by seeing whether Muslims really are more likely to want religious leaders, and to do this they used data from the World Values Survey.

When you look at the raw data, it turns out that yes, if you average out across the word then Muslims are quite a lot more likely to want religious leaders. However, it turns out that that's partly to do with the relative poverty of many Muslim countries, and also that Muslims tend simply to be more devout.  Other important factors include the high level of corruption in many Muslim countries.

The graph to the right shows the relative importance of all the different factors they unearthed.

You can see clearly that religious devotion is one of the most important factors driving support for religious leaders, and that this doesn't really differ between Christians and Muslims.

So far so good. Religious people prefer religious leaders - which is, after all only what you might expect. What you might not expect, however, is that religious people prefer religious leaders of any religion!

So, for example, devout Christians living in Muslim majority countries still want religious leaders - even though those leaders would almost certainly be Muslims, rather than Christians.

What's more, Christians in Muslim countries are as likely to want religious leaders as Muslims in Muslim countries. Which just goes to show that it's the characteristics of the country, and not the religion, that's the driving factor.

It seems that this aspect, at least, of the 'Clash of Civilizations' theory is a fantasy. The clash here is not between two different religions, but rather between the religious and the non-religious.

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Breznau, N., Lykes, V., Kelley, J., & Evans, M. (2011). A Clash of Civilizations? Preferences for Religious Political Leaders in 86 Nations Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 50 (4), 671-691 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2011.01605.x

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

People say they're good if they think God is watching

If you subliminally remind people about God, it can change their behaviour in all sorts of interesting ways. It can make people more honest, more obedient, more punishing, and even more persevering against impossible odds. And although it's not certain, it seems to work for atheists as well as the religious.

Nobody really knows quite how this effect works, but one possibility is that reminding people about God creates in them the sensation that they are being watched. If people feel like they're being watched, their behaviour changes markedly (even simply stick a photo of a pair of eyes in their peripheral vision, and they cheat less and condemn more).

Will Gervais and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, wanted to test this theory. One way they did this was to prime undergrads with thoughts of god - explicitly, not subliminally. They primed others with thoughts of other people, or nothing in particular.

Then they asked them questions about how self-conscious they felt ("Right now I am self-conscious about the way I look," "Right now I am concerned about what other people think of me," “Right now, I am concerned about the way I present myself.")

As you can see in the graph, the results they got were different for believers and non-believers.

Believers had low self-consciousness in the control condition, and their self-awareness was increased by both the People and the God priming.

Non-believers had higher self-consciousness in the control condition, which was unaffected by the people prime and actually went down with the God prime!

They also ran another experiment, which looked at something called 'socially desirable responding'. That's the tendency we all have to say the 'right thing'.

For example, if you ask people if they are "sometimes irritated by people who ask favours of me" they will usually say no - whereas, in reality of course, any normal person is sometimes irritated in that situation. We know we shouldn't be, but we are.

What Gervais found in his undergraduate subjects was that believers tend not to give socially desirable responses, unless they get primed first with thoughts of God. Non-believers, on the other hand, were more likely to give the socially desirable response without priming, and priming didn't have any affect on them.

What these studies show is that god primes really do seem to trigger responses that you would expect if people felt they were being watched. That's certainly the case for believers, although perhaps not so for non-believers.

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Gervais, W., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). 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 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.09.006

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

Religion and health - a double edged sword

Long-time readers of this blog may remember a post from 2009 on religion and health. It summarized the findings of nearly 60 studies, and concluded that while going to church seemed to be linked to better health, religious beliefs per se were unimportant.

Studies that have been published since seem to support this notion, but what nobody's been quite sure of is why church going should be linked to better health at all. Two recent studies have shed some light on the issue.

The first used data from a survey of 35,000 Norwegians, and found that regular churchgoers had lower blood pressure - after taking into account other factors that can affect blood pressure, such as age. Blood pressure is a good general indicator of your overall cardiovascular health, and so picks out those people most at risk of having a heart attack or stroke.

Now, there have been a lot of previous studies that have found similar things, but this is the first large study in a mostly non-religious country. Given that only 4% of Norwegians attend church regularly, it's fascinating that the link between church and blood pressure still holds.

The second study is even more interesting.

Darren Sherkat, a sociologist at Southern Illinois University, and Ben Moulton (a data analyst), wanted to find out how religion, health, and education interact. They used data from 22,000 Americans who participated in the National Health Interview Survey in 1987, and whose deaths were recorded over the next 20 years.

What they found (after crunching the numbers through a model to account for a host of other factors) is best understood by taking a quick squint at the graphic below. Higher bars indicate greater likelihood of dying.

You can see that, for the less well educated, the risk of dying goes down as church attendance goes up. As you would expect.

Surprisingly, however, for the educated the effect is exactly opposite! Educated people who go to church often are actually more likely to die young!


Sherkat puts this down to the double-edged effects of religious teaching on healthy behaviour.

On the one hand, it encourages abstinence from harmful drugs like tobacco and alcohol. That's great for the ill-educated who may not know any better (or be motivated to abstain). But not so much use for the educated, who have had the risks drummed into them and who are unlikely to overdo the booze and fags in the first place.

On the other hand, it tends to undermine science and evidence-based medicine. That might be particularly a problem for the educated, who might otherwise be expect to know better.

Overall, because there are more ill-educated people than educated ones, religious attendance has a beneficial effect. But the benefit really accrues to the ill-educated. For the educated, religion (at least, the kind of religion widely practised in the USA) might actually be harmful.

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Sørensen, T., Danbolt, L., Lien, L., Koenig, H., & Holmen, J. (2011). The Relationship between Religious Attendance and Blood Pressure: The Hunt Study, Norway The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, 42 (1), 13-28 DOI: 10.2190/PM.42.1.b

Moulton, B., & Sherkat, D. (2012). Specifying the Effects of Religious Participation and Educational Attainment on Mortality Risk for U.S. Adults Sociological Spectrum, 32 (1), 1-19 DOI: 10.1080/02732173.2012.628552

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