Faith at work
Does a Protestant work ethic exist? Evidence from the well-being effect of unemployment
André van Hoorn & Robbert Maseland
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, July 2013, Pages 1-12
Abstract:
Evidence on Weber's original thesis on a Protestant work ethic is ambiguous and relies on questionable measures of work attitudes. We test the relation between Protestantism and work attitudes using a novel method, operationalizing work ethic as the effect of unemployment on individuals' subjective well-being. Analyzing a sample of 150,000 individuals from 82 societies, we find strong support for a Protestant work ethic: unemployment hurts Protestants more and hurts more in Protestant societies. Whilst the results shed new light on the Protestant work ethic debate, the method has wider applicability in the analysis of attitudinal differences.
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Changes in Americans' Strength of Religious Affiliation, 1974-2010
Philip Schwadel
Sociology of Religion, Spring 2013, Pages 107-128
Abstract:
I use data from the 1974-2010 General Social Survey to analyze changes in Americans' strength of religious affiliation. Results show little change in the percent of Americans who report a strong affiliation, though the percent with a somewhat/not very strong affiliation declined from 1990 to 2010, as the number of unaffiliated respondents increased. Tradition-specific, age-period-cohort analyses show that the probability of reporting a strong religious affiliation declined considerably among Catholics, predominantly due to period-based effects in the 1980s, and increased among evangelical Protestants, also due to period-based changes. These trends have produced a large gap in the likelihood of having a strong religious affiliation between evangelical Protestants/black Protestants and mainline Protestants/Catholics. Additional analyses show considerable across-cohort changes in the association between religious service attendance and strength of religious affiliation, particularly among Catholics, suggesting that religious identity and religious practice are more loosely connected among younger generations.
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An exploration of the functions of religious monumental architecture from a Darwinian perspective
Yannick Joye & Jan Verpooten
Review of General Psychology, March 2013, Pages 53-68
Abstract:
In recent years, the cognitive science of religion has displayed a keen interest in religions' social function, bolstering research on religious prosociality and cooperativeness. The main objective of this article is to explore, from a Darwinian perspective, the biological and psychological mechanisms through which religious monumental architecture (RMA) might support that specific function. A frequently held view is that monumental architecture is a costly signal that served vertical social stratification in complex large-scale societies. In this paper we extend that view. We hypothesize that the function(s) of RMA cannot be fully appreciated from a costly signaling perspective alone, and invoke a complementary mechanism, namely sensory exploitation. We propose that, in addition to being a costly signal, RMA also often taps into an adaptive "sensitivity for bigness." The central hypothesis of this paper is that when cases of RMA strongly stimulate that sensitivity, and when commoners become aware of the costly investments that are necessary to build RMA, then this may give rise to a particular emotional response, namely awe. We will try to demonstrate that, by exploiting awe, RMA promotes and regulates prosocial behavior among religious followers and creates in them an openness to adopt supernatural beliefs.
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Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation
Jared Rubin
Review of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
The causes of the Protestant Reformation have long been debated. This paper attempts to revive and econometrically test the theory that the spread of the Reformation is linked to the spread of the printing press. I test this theory by analyzing data on the spread of the press and the Reformation at the city level. An econometric analysis which instruments for omitted variable bias with a city's distance from Mainz, the birthplace of printing, suggests that cities with at least one printing press by 1500 were at minimum 29 percentage points more likely to be Protestant by 1600.
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On the Road to Heaven: Self-Selection, Religion, and Socioeconomic Outcomes
Mohamed Saleh
Toulouse School of Economics Working Paper, December 2012
Abstract:
Correlation between religion and socioeconomic outcomes is observed in various contexts. In the Middle East, local non-Muslims are, on average, better off than the Muslim majority. I trace the origins of the phenomenon in Egypt to a historical process of self-selection across religions (based on socioeconomic status) that was motivated by an economic incentive: the imposition of the poll tax on non-Muslims upon the Islamic Conquest of the then-Coptic Christian Egypt in 640. The tax, which remained until 1855, led to the conversion of poor Copts to Islam to avoid paying the tax, and to the shrinking of Copts to a better off minority. Using new data sources that I digitized, including the 1848 and 1868 census manuscripts, I provide econometric evidence to support the hypothesis. I find that the spatial variation in poll tax enforcement in 640-900 and pre-Islamic attachment to Coptic Christianity, as measured by four historical proxies, predicts the Coptic population share in 1897. Consistent with the hypothesis predictions, the instrumented Coptic population share has a negative impact on the socioeconomic status for both Copts and Muslims, and on the Coptic-Muslim socioeconomic difference, particularly in rural Egypt, in 1848-68. I draw on a range of quantitative and qualitative evidence to support the underlying assumptions of the hypothesis and to examine the persistence of spatial and socioeconomic outcomes of Copts and Muslims.
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Peter Leeson
Public Choice, forthcoming
Abstract:
How do the members of societies that can't use government or simple ostracism produce social order? To investigate this question I use economics to analyze Gypsy law. Gypsy law leverages superstition to enforce desirable conduct in Gypsy societies where government is unavailable and simple ostracism is ineffective. According to Gypsy law, unguarded contact with the lower half of the human body is ritually polluting, ritual defilement is physically contagious, and non-Gypsies are in an extreme state of such defilement. These superstitions repair holes in simple ostracism among Gypsies, enabling them to secure social cooperation without government. Gypsies' belief system is an efficient institutional response to the constraints they face on their choice of mechanisms of social control.
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Religion as a Commitment Device: The Economics of Political Islam
Dalibor Roháč
Kyklos, May 2013, Pages 256-274
Abstract:
Why are religious parties so popular in the new and emerging democracies of the Middle East and North Africa? This paper offers an alternative to the traditional accounts that stress religiosity, the repressive nature of the previous regimes, poverty and underdevelopment, or Arab grievances against Israel. Instead, it outlines a rational choice-based explanation, in which religious political parties are able to address the problem of credible commitment, ubiquitous in new democracies. Instead of having to rely on patronage as the only mechanism of making pre-electoral commitments, Islamic parties are able to directly make credible promises about the supply of public goods. This is because they already have a history and a reputation, which both serve as channels of communication with the voters. Their reputation relies most importantly on a track record of providing social services in environments where governments have failed to do so. Furthermore, we argue that their religious nature makes them well equipped to overcome collective action problems.
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Religion as Reassurance? Testing the Insecurity Theory in 26 European Countries
Tim Immerzeel & Frank van Tubergen
European Sociological Review, April 2013, Pages 359-372
Abstract:
In this article, we extend insecurity theory by examining the influence of various kinds of insecurities on religiosity. Religiosity is operationalized in terms of a public dimension (church attendance) and a private dimension (subjective religiosity). Using data from four rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002-2008) on 26 European countries, we find strong support for the main hypothesis of insecurity theory that higher levels of insecurity are associated with increasing religiosity. Furthermore, it appears that all kinds of insecurities play a role. Specifically, we find, among others, that religiosity is higher among people who have an insecure job position, whose parents were unemployed, whose parents had a lower status job, who have experienced a war in their own country, who have lost their partner, and who reside in a country with lower social welfare spending and a higher unemployment rate. On a more general level, it is concluded that both (i) economic and existential; (ii) past and present; and (iii) individual and contextual insecurities are important in explaining (cross-national) variation in religiosity.
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Becka Alper & Daniel Olson
Sociology of Religion, Spring 2013, Pages 82-106
Abstract:
Survey data from Jews find that Jewish population density is positively related to rates of synagogue attendance and most other behavioral measures of religious commitment. We ask whether, after controlling for higher rates of religious practice in more Jewish areas, Jewish population concentration has its own separate independent negative effect on Jewish identity salience. Using the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we present three main findings. First, the simple correlation between population share and identity salience is positive. Second, after statistically controlling several key control variables, including level of Jewish practice, the overall direct effect of population share is negative. Third, we find that respondents who were raised Jewish but no longer consider themselves Jewish are more likely to reside in low Jewish population share areas. Taken together, our second and third main findings suggest that different kinds of "assimilation" are occurring in high versus low Jewish population share areas.
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Economic Modernization in Late British India: Hindu-Muslim Differences
Timur Kuran & Anantdeep Singh
Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 2013, Pages 503-538
Abstract:
In South Asia, Muslims made the transition to modern economic life more slowly than Hindus. In the first half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to use large-scale and perpetual commercial organizations and less likely to serve on corporate boards. Providing evidence, this article also explores the institutional roots of the difference in communal trajectories. Whereas Hindu inheritance practices favored capital accumulation within families and the preservation of family fortunes across generations, the Islamic inheritance system, which the British helped to enforce, tended to fragment family wealth. The family trusts (waqfs) that Muslims used to preserve assets across generations hindered capital pooling among families; they were also ill suited to profit-seeking business. Another key difference is that while Hindus generally pooled capital within durable joint-family enterprises, Muslims tended to use transitory Islamic partnerships. Hindu family businesses facilitated the transition to modern corporate life by imparting skills useful in large and durable organizations.
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"Trial by the Press": An Examination of Journalism, Ethics, and Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia
Janet Steele
International Journal of Press/Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In the United States, when journalists or legal scholars use the term "trial by the press," it is usually in the context of pretrial publicity, and the First Amendment right to freedom of expression versus the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial. Although this understanding of the term exists in Indonesia and Malaysia, there it is also used in a variety of other ways that are related to the teachings of Islam and the legacy of authoritarianism. Islam contains strict prohibitions against gossip, libel, and other forms of defamation. For those who are uncomfortable with what they see as the excesses of press freedom, "trial by the press," or the idea that the press should not "judge" someone until the facts have been proven in a court of law strongly resembles the Islamic injunctions against fitnah (slander) and gossip. The question of when a Muslim journalist can properly divulge something negative about someone else has implications not only for the popular understanding of libel and defamation but also for investigative reporting. Because the accusation of "trial by the press" resonates with deeply held Islamic principles, it can be an exceptionally powerful political tool.
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Daniel McShea & Wim Hordijk
Evolutionary Biology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The eye and brain: standard thinking is that these devices are both complex and functional. They are complex in the sense of having many different types of parts, and functional in the sense of having capacities that promote survival and reproduction. Standard thinking says that the evolution of complex functionality proceeds by the addition of new parts, and that this build-up of complexity is driven by selection, by the functional advantages of complex design. The standard thinking could be right, even in general. But alternatives have not been much discussed or investigated, and the possibility remains open that other routes may not only exist but may be the norm. Our purpose here is to introduce a new route to functional complexity, a route in which complexity starts high, rising perhaps on account of the spontaneous tendency for parts to differentiate. Then, driven by selection for effective and efficient function, complexity decreases over time. Eventually, the result is a system that is highly functional and retains considerable residual complexity, enough to impress us. We try to raise this alternative route to the level of plausibility as a general mechanism in evolution by describing two cases, one from a computational model and one from the history of life.
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Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt
Joel Lehman & Kenneth Stanley
PLoS ONE, April 2013
Abstract:
Why evolvability appears to have increased over evolutionary time is an important unresolved biological question. Unlike most candidate explanations, this paper proposes that increasing evolvability can result without any pressure to adapt. The insight is that if evolvability is heritable, then an unbiased drifting process across genotypes can still create a distribution of phenotypes biased towards evolvability, because evolvable organisms diffuse more quickly through the space of possible phenotypes. Furthermore, because phenotypic divergence often correlates with founding niches, niche founders may on average be more evolvable, which through population growth provides a genotypic bias towards evolvability. Interestingly, the combination of these two mechanisms can lead to increasing evolvability without any pressure to out-compete other organisms, as demonstrated through experiments with a series of simulated models. Thus rather than from pressure to adapt, evolvability may inevitably result from any drift through genotypic space combined with evolution's passive tendency to accumulate niches.
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Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty
Gary Lewis & Timothy Bates
Journal of Research in Personality, August 2013, Pages 398-405
Abstract:
Although genetic factors underpin individual differences in religiosity, the psychological mechanisms through which such influences are manifested are presently unknown. Religiosity is associated with concerns for community integration and existential certainty, suggesting that heritable influences underlying such sentiments may overlap with heritable influences underpinning religiosity. Here we tested this hypothesis within a genetically informative design, using a large, nationally-representative twin sample. As predicted, heritable effects underlying community integration and existential uncertainty were strongly overlapping with the heritable influences on religiosity. These findings are consistent with the position that individual differences in religiosity are mediated through biological systems involved in meeting both social and existential needs, although further work is required to determine directions of causal action.
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Samuel Perry
Social Science Quarterly, forthcoming
Objective: This study examines how religious affiliations, salience, beliefs, and practices influence engagement in interracial dating or romance.
Methods: Bivariate and multivariate analyses are employed using data from the 2007 Baylor Religion Survey (N = 1,268). Logistic regression models are estimated in order to determine how certain dimensions of religious life predict whether one has engaged in interracial dating or romance, net of sociodemographic and ideological controls.
Results: Relative to evangelicals, mainline Protestants are less likely to have engaged in interracial romance. Those who frequently attend church and affirm biblical literalism are less likely to have dated across race, but those who engage in devotional practices such as prayer and sacred text reading are more likely to have interracialy dated.
Conclusion: The relationship between religion and interracial romance is more complex than previously thought. Future studies should both acknowledge and account for this complexity in their analyses.
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Unexpected enchantment in unexpected places: Mormonism in Battlestar Galactica
Iver Neumann
European Journal of Cultural Studies, April 2013, Pages 226-243
Abstract:
The study of religion leads a curiously secluded life within intellectual circles. This article argues that this is to our loss, particularly on the part of students of popular culture, since a number of the most widely discussed artefacts depend on religious themes for their effect. Taking note of the largely non-religious reception of one TV show, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the article offers a detailed reading of its constitutive religious narrative, aiming to demonstrate how this narrative owes very much indeed to Mormon theology. In conclusion, the article argues that intellectuals need to regain the skills needed to identify and analyse religious thinking, lest we miss the hermeneutic level on which religiously based artefacts are actually consumed by many viewers.
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Humble Self-Enhancement: Religiosity and the Better-Than-Average Effect
Kimmo Eriksson & Alexander Funcke
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research has linked religiosity to certain forms of self-enhancement. We extend this literature by three studies linking religiosity to the well-established better-than-average effect (BAE). First, a reanalysis of self-judgments of desirable characteristics in 15 nations showed that the BAE was stronger in more religious countries, even taking into account gross domestic product, interdependence, and economic inequality. Second, in two online surveys totaling 1,000 Americans, the BAE was stronger among more religious individuals. Several observations indicated that this relation was due to individuals self-stereotyping with respect to their religious in-groups. In particular, the relation was restricted to characteristics on the warmth dimension, consistent with the religious stereotype, and the average religious in-group member tended to be judged even more favorably than self. The latter phenomenon, which we term humble self-enhancement, is consistent with other studies linking stronger religiosity to greater favoritism of the religious in-group and greater derogation of religious out-groups.
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Teleological reasoning about nature: Intentional design or relational perspectives?
Bethany Ojalehto, Sandra Waxman & Douglas Medin
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, April 2013, Pages 166-171
Abstract:
According to the theory of ‘promiscuous teleology', humans are naturally biased to (mistakenly) construe natural kinds as if they (like artifacts) were intentionally designed ‘for a purpose'. However, this theory introduces two paradoxes. First, if infants readily distinguish natural kinds from artifacts, as evidence suggests, why do school-aged children erroneously conflate this distinction? Second, if Western scientific education is required to overcome promiscuous teleological reasoning, how can one account for the ecological expertise of non-Western educated, indigenous people? Here, we develop an alternative ‘relational-deictic' interpretation, proposing that the teleological stance may not index a deep-rooted belief that nature was designed for a purpose, but instead may reflect an appreciation of the perspectival relations among living things and their environments.
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Catholics versus Protestants: On the Benefit Incidence of Faith-Based Foreign Aid
Niklas Bengtsson
Economic Development and Cultural Change, April 2013, Pages 479-502
Abstract:
We estimate the impact of a village-level assistance program run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania on schooling and literacy. These programs are partly funded by foreign aid from US and Scandinavian donors. Difference-in-difference estimates suggest that the program increased literacy by 15-20 percentage points and educational attainment by 10-15 percentage points, but only among Protestant children. Catholic children living in the same targeted villages were unaffected. Supplementary evidence implies that these results cannot be explained by observable differences at baseline, nor are Catholic households less inclined to accept development assistance in general. The combined results support the concern that faith organizations might overstate their ability to aid households of different faith.
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Critical Stress: Police Officer Religiosity and Coping with Critical Stress Incidents
Jason Clark-Miller & Hallie Brady
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, April 2013, Pages 26-34
Abstract:
As a result of exposure to critical stress inducing incidents, police officers experience high rates of family disruption, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and physical and psychological problems. This paper evaluates the ability of religion to mitigate the harmful consequences of critical stress using data obtained from a survey of metropolitan police officers (n = 811). Contrary to our expectations, we found less religious officers used more adaptive coping strategies when confronted by critical stress incidents than their more religious counterparts. Furthermore, we found Protestants employed more adaptive strategies than Catholics. Potential explanations for the unexpected findings are discussed.
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Nicole Stephens et al.
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, May 2013, Pages 606-619
Abstract:
Two studies utilized firsthand accounts from survivors of two major natural disasters - Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Chilean earthquake in 2010 - to investigate (1) how people make sense of their disaster experiences and (2) who understands these events in religious terms. We found that describing the disasters as an act of God was among the most common explanations. Moreover, the degree to which survivors encountered extreme hardship - unpredictable, disruptive, and uncontrollable experiences - predicted explanations of the events as an act of God. These findings held even after controlling for demographic factors (educational attainment and race/ethnicity) known to be associated with religiosity. Notably, objective experiences (e.g., seeing dead bodies) were better predictors of religious meaning-making than relatively subjective psychological reactions to those experiences (e.g., fear). These studies extend the literature by examining how experiences of hardship in real-world contexts underlie religious meaning-making and suggest that religiosity emerges, in part, from variation in individual experience.